


You want it darker

by drglass (fluorescentgrey)



Category: 19th Century CE RPF, Bandom, The Libertines
Genre: Absinthe, Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst, Art History, Belgium (Country), Drinking, Drug Abuse, Drug Use, Drugs, I'm Sorry, Mental Health Issues, Multi, POV Second Person, Recreational Drug Use, The Belgian Symbolism AU nobody asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 11:12:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9653639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/drglass
Summary: Belgium, 1888. When you were nineteen you were forsaken by queen and country alike (rather a shock, autumn, a letter discovered, and the leaves had fallen and it had begun daily and nightly already to rain) and as such you took the ferry in the navy-royal crush of earlyevening across the tall black water to the continent — to Bruges.





	

**Author's Note:**

> nb: the bleakness of this reflects "canon" so read with caution if you need. much artistic license has been taken with both the libs narrative and late-19th century belgian symbolism so bear with me.   
> more notes / links to artwork, reference points and etc. at the end.

_ Bruges, Belgium  
_ _ 1888 _

\--

** I.  **

When you were nineteen you were forsaken by queen and country alike (rather a shock, autumn, a letter discovered, and the leaves had fallen and it had begun daily and nightly already to rain) and as such you took the ferry in the navy-royal crush of earlyevening across the tall black water to the continent — to Bruges. 

You had only your notebooks in a satchel and the clothes on your back to your name any longer. And your name hardly a name any longer. 

You showed up drenched and sleepless shivering on the threshold of your sister's drafty mansard garret just before dawn. Her eyes went big and dark when she saw you. “What in hell are you doing here.” 

She was in her dressing gown, hair wild; behind her was the room where she lived, peeling wallpaper, and the filthy sinking crescent of dawn-pale moon through the misshapen window across the still square and the dead canals, and in her bed (skin blue-lit with the dregs of night in the white sheets shock of dark hair like a violent inkspill) was a man who was sleeping. She stepped into the narrow drafty hall (smelt of cigarettes, damp and laundry, a stillness begetting sickness) and behind herself she shut the door. She smelled like lavender water and paints. 

“I tried to write,” you told her. Your voice was mystified and thick with exhaustion and in fact you hadn't. It had all been very quick truth be told. 

“So you were finally disowned.”

“Well yes. In notsomany words.” In unkinder words. 

“Well you can't stay here,” said your sister, crossing her arms across her chest, “this place is let to me by the museum and it's just one room. So I don't know what you intend on — ”

You must have made some kind of horrible face because she went in for just a moment rolling her eyes and when she came back out she had shoes on and a coat and a scarf to cover her hair and wrapped in a clean dishcloth a bit of bread and two bruised mealy apples and half a bottle of red wine sealed with a broken cork and imprinted at the neck with traces of her lipstick. 

\--

Your sister had been a student in art history in the first class at Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall and as such immediately after completing the course she had expatriated for Belgium and begun to serve as an archivist at a museum containing works by the Old Masters on the Groeninge not far from Bonifacius Bridge. When you had lived still in the family home in Newcastle you had corresponded with her occasionally and sent her the better of your work and she had responded with friendly and constructive criticism and sent tracts by poets from Paris and Brussels and postcard-size prints by the artists of Les XX. All the text you clumsily translated by candlelight in your bedroom from the original French with a dictionary stolen from your father’s library. 

Bruges was the deadest city you had ever set foot in and the most still. Unbreathing and eerie-silent echoing only with the sound of your and your sister’s footsteps as though this were but a shared dream. Long ago the river and the canals to the sea had silted and in the brackish predawn hour the light seemed to filter through some otherworld mirror and you wondered if you had crossed in the night not only the channel but some portal into a faerie kingdom where the sun had been hostage-taken by a birdlike god and your sister slept with strange men. 

“I'm taking you somewhere you can stay for now,” your sister said; she whispered, the stone caught it, swallowed, like a mausoleum, “it belongs to the museum but no one sets foot there besides the archivists. So if anyone catches you then you'd best not say you know me.” 

“I won’t.” 

“You can make up a story for the _polisie_. An itinerant English poet skinflint and off his luck who can’t speak Flemish…” 

She ducked and you followed her into a tight alleyway where she unlocked with a skeleton key a narrow green door. Beyond it were several flights of dusty and undertrodden marble stairs and a third-floor mansard full to its high lofted rafters with canvases turned inward and draped in cloth, stacked together, antique furniture, tapestries; all of it haunted-shadow in the pale light through the high windows and all of it bore a blanket-thick layer of dust like a silencing spread of snow or volcanic ash. The draft came in from somewhere you could not see and threaded a chill up your spine the texture of bone. 

“There’s a stove for heat in the winter,” your sister was saying. “You could put a kettle on.” 

“Where am I supposed to sleep?” 

She fixed you with this look — such an older-sister look it almost made you laugh. “On the bloody floor. Where else?” 

“It’s frigid cold.” 

“Because your clothes are soaking wet.” 

“Well I haven’t got anything else. I left — they gave me all of ten minutes. I got my books and my purse. That was really all. I haven’t slept — or I slept for an hour on the train. But that was two days ago.” 

She turned toward you in the door. With the shadow silhouetting her in her white dressing gown and the scarf crowning her head dark with rain she looked like one of the prints she’d sent you by Odilon Redon. 

“Make a fire and eat something,” she said. “I’ll have Carl bring you — I think I have some extra blankets.” 

\--

You woke up when someone knocked upon the door. The time of day was indistinguishable by the light in the window because it seemed no later than dawn. The draft smelled like rain. The knock at the door came again. Your clothes were still wet, and you were lightheaded and drymouthed from dreaming and from the wine, and the smell of the paints and the dust and the ash of the woodstove was heavy and soporific and intoxicating, synesthetic, almost hallucinogenic. At the door when you opened it at first just a crack was your sister’s lover. He wore a black coat and there was hash in his cigarette. His blue eyes were the only color in the dark hallway; in the shadow even the ember and the paper of the cigarette and even his skin and even his lips seemed shades of grey. Struck from a blackened flint. “You’re the poet,” he said. 

He was a young Englishman with unplacable accent so thick it sounded more like a sort of dialect. When you stepped aside to let him inside he kicked before him a woven basket containing numerous ashy woolen blankets and a pallet stuffed with hay. Another bottle of wine, a crust of day-old bread in a paper bag. A soft and moldy rind of unidentifiable cheese. 

“Isn’t there a stove in here.” 

“I was asleep. It went out.” 

He was far younger, glaringly so, when you looked at him, than your sister; he could not have been much older than you. He looked as though recently he’d been in a fight through nothing more than the speed and huntedness with which he moved. As for his face it was perfect. The lips particularly bloodless and erotic as a drained stigmata. Chapped with cold. Smoke curled out of him, like a tendril of his soul. You were thinking, possessed by it suddenly, of the oracles at Delphi, like if you could breathe it (suck it out of him like venom) you would have prophetic puzzle-visions. 

“Have you got wood?” 

“Yeah. No matches.” 

You did not tell him you’d used them all lighting the stove after your sister had left trembling them all out with your hands waterlogged white-blue like the Little Match Girl, foggy-headed with cold and sleeplessness and humming to yourself either with exhaustion or with fear. Words stringing together behind your eyes inside your mind like etchings upon a tablet. 

He lit the fire again in the stove and you unpacked the blankets and the pallet and shoved them all in a kind of lean-to of canvasses like a bower or a nest. In the bottom of the basket were some clothes, pants and shirts, threadbare and colorless. 

The voice from not far behind you. And the new wood-warmth at your ankles. The thick humid smell of the wine in the still air; he must have opened the bottle. “She said you had not much with you.” 

“Yeah, she said right.” 

“The clothes on your back she said.” 

“Yes.” 

“I thought your family were rich.” 

“More with assets than with compassion.” 

You draped your coat somewhere it would dry. Cuffed your sleeves. He was watching you a little — at the fraying hems of your pants which were too short and your ankles showed and one of them was bruised in glowing crepuscular gradient of color where you’d slammed it on something boarding the ferry in Hull in the gloaming. 

“What’s your name again.” 

“Peter.”

“Right.” He paused. He didn’t look away so you knew it was only a pause. “She said you were disowned.” 

You told him the story while you set out your notebooks before the stove so the warped pages would dry. You caught him studying the runic scratch of your handwriting but you spoke into it. Into the pale silence. Cut a wedge of cheese soft and ripe with mold and pressed it into the stale crust of bread with your thumb feeling starven as an urchin for attention above all. 

“I was sending all my work to poets in Paris and London.” 

He smiled almost brutally showing the knife-edge of one broken tooth. “Looking for your Verlaine.” 

“Maybe. Anyway one sent me a letter back with a piece of mine in it he’d made notes on. And it was a bit — ah, decadent.” 

“How so decadent.” 

You found the page in one of the notebooks and pressed the book into his hands. His eyebrow lifted after not so very long higher and higher up his forehead into his hair. 

“They were rather looking for an excuse on account of previous histories. I suppose it was the last straw.” 

He put the notebook back down on the floor pressing the pages of it open with the artful hands. Dirt under the fingernails, and ash, perhaps blood; they were bitten short and picked at around the beds, degraded, and the knuckles were bruised like a boxer’s with old marks like faded burns or tea stains, and he wore a single very simple tarnished gold ring. 

_Awaiting my second soul in abstract purgatory haunted and turgid-sick with nightmare in an asphyxiated eternity of black-glass fog… I am afraid the only language for all my longing is unspeakably vulgar as the taste of wine gone to vinegar. It twists-chokes me by the tongue when I try to speak it and I a child the shade-shadow of my mother washes my mouth out in her powder room with soap that tastes of lilac —_

“You’ve read _A Rebours_ ,” he said.

“Yes, of course.” 

“It wasn’t a question.” 

The silence was a little tight, cloying. Like wet clothes. Inside the woodstove something slipped in the fire. 

“Well,” you said. “Are you a writer?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“How do you not know?” 

“I haven’t tried it.” 

“Maybe you should.” 

He looked at you for another moment — at your wrists, this time, then at the corner of jaw beneath your ear. Seeking, you realized, the pieces which held you together, as though there were some clue in them. Finally he produced a small leather-bound book from the inside pocket of his long black coat. 

“I’m a painter,” he told you. The words unpracticed and almost reluctant to be vocalized. 

On the first page inside the book lined and creased and bent to the shape of the place it pressed against him was a smudgy black charcoal drawing of a youth crowned by sunlight. The face angelic and gestural as if concealed beneath a veil and washed with a calm connoting ecstasy or death. The shadow was thick and liquid and the light felt blinding though it was only paper, and you thought with a twisting twinge of jealousy that there was a poetry in it beyond anything you had yet mastered. 

“Who is it?” 

He didn’t say anything. He reached out and took the book back from your open hands. 

You finished the wine between you and then he left. He had work to do, he said, and you realized you had never asked him about his profession. When you cleaned up the bread and cheese you found the pads of your fingers smudgy ash-black with pastel… It smelled like a clean flame. Like a dark room. 

\--

**II.**

Those artists who hadn’t been invited to Les XX or L’Essor worked mostly in a studio above a cafe down an alley off one of the central squares. You went with your sister of an evening and already in her attic room you had shared between the two of you most of a bottle of wine. The cafe downstairs was open and already inside (perhaps it was just past the dinner hour) were ten or so patrons semi-conscious with absinthe. 

You had been telling your sister about the mockery of it all, about your attempt at Cambridge and the letters and what you remembered of your father’s exact words, and that he had said he was going to send not for the police but for a doctor, et cetera et cetera, and your sister’s face had changed a little around the mouth and eyes. When you had come in she had hidden letters sent to her from Newcastle but you had seen them and several weeks later would read them while she slept; they were not edifying. So you had changed the subject. 

“It’s a right shithole,” she was saying. In the dark stairs the smell of opium and hashish smoke was stale and still. Burnt toast, old fires, absinthe and pale Belgian beer, sweat, paints. “But these are all the folks I know of your persuasion.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

She rolled her eyes and at the end of it as punctuation fixed you with a glare. “Whatever you call yourselves. Symbolists, modernists, libertines, what have you.” 

Yet there was only one in the dark stale mansard and it was him, painting by candlelight. When he saw the two of you in the door he came over and kissed your sister’s cheek and the back of her hand and then he clasped yours and his was cold. He smelled like hashish and coffee and the ichorous charcoal-soda of pigment and canvas and the candlelight washed golden over him like a flag… 

“Isn’t there anybody else here?” your sister asked. She was looking around the room with unamusement. 

“You aren’t happy to see me?” 

“I’d hoped to introduce my brother to more of — your set.” 

“Soon enough.” He turned and went back to his canvas. His sleeves were cuffed up to his elbows and there was black paint like ink or blood smeared up the bony flat of his forearms. It was to you he gestured: “Come and look.” 

Your sister went and you followed. She had gathered her pale skirts close to herself against their sticking in the tarry floor muddy with spilled paints. Together you looked at the canvas all three for a shuddering silent eternity in which the guttering of the candleflame seemed very loud. 

“Rather a poor likeness of Peter,” said your sister at last. She had crossed her arms tightly across her chest. 

You had not realized it was you. But it was. Your eyes were washed-out and hollow white; it was not that he had not yet painted them so much as for this facsimile they were unnecessary. Around you was an ecstasy of seething bodies entombed and faceless in blackened shadow. It was, you realized, your poem: _awaiting my second soul in abstract purgatory…_

“It’s a fine likeness,” you said, bewildered. 

“The black-glass fog…” He looked away, cleaning his brushes with a wet handkerchief that smelled of turpentine. “It was sticking in my head.” 

You went down to the cafe the three of you and watched whilst the barman poured sizable allotments of pale green absinthe over a sugarcube over a silver spoon over and over blush of seafoam color in the light-golden glass. There was a table by the fireplace at which you sat and your sister asked him what he had been up to as she hadn’t seen him in a couple days. It all seemed rather pointed so you looked into the fire. Words were milling about in your head like ants. Perhaps it was the absinthe. Licorice and sugar… something felt opening up at the back of your skull just enough to let the air in, soft as breath. 

\--

A few days later in the rain you went back to the studio alone. As if tugged there by some invisible strand. There were a few others in the dark and the shadows but either they were painting or they were passed out. He was in his same corner. “Don’t move,” he said when he saw you in the door. So you didn’t. 

When he was finished you went down again to the cafe and ordered the same glasses of absinthe and sat at the same table by the fireplace. “Don’t lead my sister on,” you told him. It was hushed just enough by the fire crackling and around you the laughter and the sighs. 

He scoffed a little. “She’s leading me on if anything.” 

“How so do you figure.” 

“She works at the museum. That was just about the first thing she said to me.” He gave you an odd look you couldn’t decipher. “We’re using one another. That’s how these things work, among adults.” 

“Well I know that.” 

“Do you really.” 

He took from the inside pocket of his coat a pretty engraven case filled with tightly rolled cigarettes. When he lit one you could smell they were the ones he must’ve rolled himself with hashish. And so when he offered you one you took it. 

“Why are you painting me?” 

“I don’t know. Your writing said something to me. Like under the words.” 

“All it says under the words is, in that place where I was, it was like a prison, and I was dying of loneliness.” 

“Exactly,” he said, brow tightening. As though it were very obvious. 

\--

When you got back home — it had been two weeks, you realized/remembered, head swimming drunk, and you were thinking of it already as _home_ — it was nearly dawn. You were so untired you sat on the floor before the stove writing for two hours before sleep crept up on you, and it was noon before you woke from dreams with your stomach rumbling and a great black hole of memory in the space where not so long ago — 

_Let us go then you & i and run electric through the canal souls clattering upon the flagstones til one of us spills on ice our heads open for the world to look inside. _

Your own handwriting illegible drunk like the musings of some other self or another man entirely. Laughter in the dead city echoing inside your mind like a cave of bats. Like words. 

_Let us go. You & i have had my fill or more than of solitaire/confinement in this still and silent room. _

\--

**III.**

When it got to be winter proper you and your sister had a row of Krakatoan proportions being as she had written to your parents in full color detail and not only disclosed your location (Bruges, city museum storage garret) but the sort of company you kept and all the rest of it. She had done this mostly because there had been a near miss wherein one of her coworkers at the museum had nearly discovered your squat. Promptly you had moved out and into a single basement room on a glorified alley called Kelkstraat  which belonged technically to someone’s father’s new wife’s brother-in-law but which the painter had lived in since he had come from Exeter under circumstances he had not yet bothered to disclose. Despite this your sister was still upset. She reminded you that her employment at the museum was of utmost importance to her and that she had expected to be a sort of stepping stone for you and not necessarily your full-time patron and/or benefactor. You replied that this was rather complicated by the fact that you had no money and she replied that there were plenty of things even in Bruges one could do in order to make money. You reminded her that you had left Cambridge under circumstances that would not do to be unearthed or shared or otherwise at all revealed and she said yes, yes indeed she had inferred that through her correspondences, though Mother’s constitution was too weak to discuss the matter with much frankness and even Father had spared key details, citing her “virtue.”

“Fine,” you had told her. “Do you really want to know.” 

“As a matter of fact I bloody don’t.” 

You had also sensed that some of this was her way around discussing the indiscussible which was that she really did not spend much time with your mutual friend anymore, whilst you lived with him in abject yet romantic squalor, and that once you had seen her in a cafe with another man, older and sophisticated whose tastes and comportment smacked of wealth. 

Bitten back behind both your mismatched teeth was, Are you sleeping with him? 

Your answer would have been, sort of: you and he were obliged to share a mattress; though you had offered to sleep on the pallet on the floor you quickly found it was too cold. He slept normally and you slept with your head at the foot of the bed. Sometimes you were kept awake writing down the things he said in his sleep, patterning abstract nonsense, feeling (you were so close) the blankets moving just so when he sighed. 

As such you did not see your sister much anymore, even as Bruges was only so big, and you found a job, a few hours a week, at a bookbinder’s, and you wrote day and night in the basement room and in the cafes and in the studio beside him while he painted, you and not you, you as a woman, you as a child, you as an angel, you as Parsifal, you as Salome and John the Baptist, himself as Salome and John the Baptist, himself as the Fisher King, himself as death, himself as a child, himself as a woman, himself and not himself. The both of you as twins, as gods. As players in every scene out of the cultural mythologies of most known nations. As allegories for everything from inebriation to innocence. His work was in his books and wallpapered the basement to the ceiling and the floor and he rolled the canvases tightly together to fit them under the bed and stacked them in his corner in the studio above the cafe. Anna Boch of Les XX came to the studio and saw his work whilst you were there writing and she looked through all of it and she looked at you (you were drunk, sitting on the floor, writing in your book in the vee of your spread legs; your shoes were falling apart and so was your coat, you were smoking one of his hash cigarettes, you had had bad dreams the night previous and they would not leave you) and she looked at him, and you thought he looked very beautiful, because he looked almost terrified. But nothing came of it. 

\--

Something came of something else. You had a poem in a chapbook with new work by Rodenbach among a few others. It was an old poem of yours and you thought not so good. It was from Cambridge around the time of the whole affair; you had offered the publisher several others, recent ones, but they had declined. Still it was better than nothing and still it emboldened his jealousy. He took you out to celebrate and bought you a glass of absinthe and a pouch of Parke-Davis cocaine powder which was surprising and generous because neither of you could ever really afford to buy the other things, even food, most of which you stole or begged. You felt alight and full of joy. You went together to the seediest of the cafes you frequented and beautiful women in feathers and tulle and little else kissed your face leaving bright rouge-prints and the well of laughter. “Careful,” he was saying in your ear, “beware the syphilitic sirens…” But he did not really smile nor did he otherwise speak. 

Together you walked back to the basement just before dawn. “Your time’ll come yet,” you were saying, or something like it. “It’s — I can sense it.” 

“I can’t.” 

“You have less of a mind for the infinite and I mean that in the kindest way.” When you said his name he flinched. “Come this time next year — I know so. It’ll be Les XX or the bottom of the canal.” 

You couldn’t stop talking. Likely it was the cocaine. When you got home, you said, you would make mulled wine on the stove in the teakettle. You were sure you remembered how. Recently you had received some rum from a source unknown and there had to be, somewhere, perhaps under the bed, a dusty bottle of red. There was at least one orange and in a fit of nostalgia the month previous you had bought cloves for the smell of them. It was like you could feel his anger but all you could do was talk into it in attempt to diffuse or whatever else. It was silent with you on the pavements and the snow it touched blinked into vapor and you knew logically somewhere in your addled conscience that it would not burn out on its own without some kind of kindling. 

Inside the basement room it was so frigid cold with night and the draft that the sound of the door snicking shut seemed to shatter or snap like balsawood. And he was close behind you and all around. Your back so suddenly against the wall you wondered if it had moved from wherever it had always been. Your foot slipped against a pile of his sketches on the floor. A canvas sticking out from under the bed juddered in the movement. The aniseseed licorice-sugar on his breath so sharp and sour you could taste it — could feel the rime of pale yellow glass inside your lip. The sharp spoon and the laughter… the alien way it glowed in the barlight and inside yourself, and in his mouth and eyes. 

You understood he wanted to demand an apology but did not know where to begin. He demanded something else instead such as it was and you allowed it; your head was too fucked to remember last time this had happened you had sworn you would not allow it again for anything except love. But maybe he did love you. 

\--

Afterward you lay in the bed naked but for your coat, sticky, shaky in the knees, and you heard him make a fire in the stove, the clanging of the kettle, drifted. Outside the wind around the buildings and around the canals whistled and howled and moaned like a loosed nightmare. Eventually he came to you with a warm wet cloth. The lightning shock of hurt when you sat up passed electric through your spine and disappeared again. If he was a different man he might’ve said something like, I didn’t mean to hurt you. Instead he was studying your skin inside your open coat. The place where already you could feel the bruise bleeding a kind of violet wampum string the shape of his teeth into itself inside your neck and shoulder. I wasn’t a virgin, you wondered if you should tell him. 

\--

You washed again in the morning while he slept and after a little while you realized he was not sleeping. You went back to the bed and stroked his hair from his face and when his mouth opened you kissed his lower lip. In another silent moment his tongue touched yours. 

\--

**IV.**

You went out in the snow and bought bread and cheese and tobacco at the shops with small gold coins. And a box of dark charcoal pastels and fancy milky parchment bound in leather and candles, matches, wine two steps up from swill, and, impulsively, a cobalt-glass ashtray. Two thick horsehair paintbrushes new and soft and artfully pointed and for yourself a new set of fountain pens and a well of red-black bloodlike novelty ink. For a while you stood and looked at a guitar and eventually you dragged your thumbnail across the strings and in the sonorous hollowness the sound was tuneless and made you shiver. Quickly thereafter you left without purchasing it. 

You brought your notebook to the mansard where he painted and wrote sitting on the floor with a bottle of wine. The other artists came and went customarily addled with drink and drugs and gave you their most sincere congratulations on the publication in broken English and all you could do sometimes was clasp your hand like over your heart while he sat in the corner pointedly ignoring the complete exchange. 

“You and he should make a book,” said one, on a white-brown sort of unreal day when you could smell Spring. “Like Khnopff and Peladan. He can illustrate your poetry or you can illustrate his paintings after all they have a not dissimilar feeling.” 

“How’s that?” 

You caught his gaze for a moment him looking up over the edge of the canvas with the blue fools’-pocket flash of his eye in candle-shadow. 

“It feels like — like youth and bad mistakes.” 

You laughed at that; so did he, quietly, from the corner, hiding it; probably nobody else would’ve heard it unless they were paying attention, which you were. You were listening to him always as he was listening to you even asleep and even when you were not speaking you were listening to each other. 

“That’s where it comes from,” you said. “Speaking for myself. From my bad mistakes.” 

“What about you?” asked the other painter, turning to the corner. 

He looked into the blackest corner of the room like a mirror. “The same, I think, but bigger. From all of everyone’s youthful bad mistakes. Since we crawled out of the primordial swamp.” 

I bloody love you, you were trying to say, with your eyes. The other painter left and you listened to the footsteps on the stairs. Outside through the shuttered boarded window it was so very still and quiet there was almost no other sound in the room but breathing and his brush against the canvas. “What are you looking at me like that for,” he said. So you said, smiling, nothing. 

\--

You went downstairs together and met your friends at the table by the fireplace and had a bit of absinthe or maybe someone had in a little leather bag in their coat pocket cocaine powder or cigarettes and felt flush enough to share. This girl had taken a liking to you and about six more girls had taken likings to him and spoke amongst each other in rapid Flemish so you couldn’t understand and as they did they cast one another withering looks that were nonetheless decipherable. Together in the wet-cold darkness in black wool coats like some deathly herd you walked from cafe to cafe with strange women on your arm you never saw again and sometimes you wondered if they were real. Absinthe and sweet-bitter Belgian ales and the sound the sound of music and of laughter you closed your eyes and were dizzy and the room smelled like sweat and licorice and someone kissed your face all over in a kind of attempted resuscitation. The two of you walked back to the basement together after long-lost devoured hours laughing laughing in the dead streets grasping at each other to keep from falling on the ice and eventually just to touch. The stone hushed and clutched and silenced. At home in bed you had to teach him how to make love to you with tenderness. 

\--

Yet sometimes you could not write. You hovered pen over the page hand just trembling and it would not come. And sometimes you woke in the morning and he had not come home. You sat on the end of the unmade bed in the shaft of light through the ashy high window and watched the shoes moving upon the sidewalk, waiting for him and pretending you were not waiting for him, thinking about asking, were you with my sister? Or else with who? People looked at him more than they looked at you; he was the person who did the most looking at you, but he didn’t do it all the time. He swept in the door like the east wind, erotically disheveled, shirt misbuttoned showing a red mark on his neck inside his collar, and you got up (slamming the door) and went out and walked in the street feeling the cold against your face and neck like a numbing sort of blow. Sometimes he would come after you and find you invariably shitfaced drunk in one of the seedier cafes and you would have a screaming match in an alley culminating with at least one thrown punch and a subsequent blowjob. This is how it goes, you thought, sinking into the wall (bare ass, cold brick, ice under your heels, above the clouds shifted infinitesimally showing a dreamlike glimpse of stars); it is what it is, love in the time of absinthe and syphilis… 

Words generated against the darkness inside your head. Laughing. You woke up in a strange bed of an afternoon, naked, the previous night blurred out as with charcoal, and someone was reading Shelley by the fire. For a while you considered it a kind of clever vengeance. 

Together, waiting for everything and nothing, alone in the mansard studio, laughing. Laughing and drinking over everything like a sort of brilliant fiction because in the throes of it, of the laughter, and the drunkenness, and the intoxication with love, and (or?) with sex, you and he believed with a stupid and very youthful sincerity that all the necessary unsaid could be passed between you without being vocalized aloud. 

\--

**V**. 

The influenza came at the end of the winter with the changing of the seasons and one by one all of the artists who worked in the studio and frequented the same cafes took ill and at last he took ill. It was a Tuesday just past noon when you woke to the sound of him vomiting in the chamber pot at the foot of the bed. His skin was warm and sallow and elastic and his hair very dark stuck in salt-sweat tendrils against his face and neck like seaweed or tattoos. You built the fire up and fed him bone broth and a mixture of camphor in camomile tea and a bit of laudanum in water so he would sleep and you tried to write but fear was beating in your heart upon a war drum and when you so much as looked at him sometimes the terror seemed devouring. If he were to die or so you quickly convinced yourself the only thing for you to do would be to crawl back to the house in Newcastle like a dog and submit yourself for institutionalization in Bedlam or whatever it was your parents had initially suggested. 

Instead he recovered and you fell ill in his place with almost comical rapidity. He sent for your sister who sent for a doctor who was too overwhelmed to prescribe any more than spirits of ammonia and a tincture of lavender and despite the faithful administration of both these compounds you were swiftly delirious. Later you did not remember much of what had happened at all but for at the depths or height of it you were motionless in a black room with death whose touch was cool, and you could feel the thread of pain spooling out of yourself, turning on a sort of gyre or a spindle, and with it went the hunger and the uncertainty and the fear and jealousy, and every hollowness, and every night that you could not write, and every night that he did not come home, and you would have succumbed to it gladly — almost did; for once, you thought, it would have been easy, easier, easiest just to stop breathing — but for at that very moment out of the darkness back in the burning-bright world you could hear his voice and it called out your name. 

\--

You woke up, such as it was, in another day’s time, dusk or dawn by the light in the window, stomach raw with hunger and vision bleary-blurred as though spread with ointment. He was in the chair by the bed where you had sat during his convalescence sketching in the notebook and evidently he was drawing you because he did not notice you were conscious until he looked up with an expression of studious intent which faded when he saw your eyes were open. He was startled enough to kiss you. 

“You were dying,” he said, “all last night and the day before. I nearly sent for a priest. But then I realized I didn’t know — what your faith was if you even had one.” 

“I don’t,” you tried. Your voice had gone and left behind it a kind of rasping shadow. Something in your head still felt melting. Were you calling for me, you didn’t ask; I heard you… 

He took his notebook from the table at the bedside and showed you the blurry charcoal sketches he had made of you on what he had presumed to be your deathbed in which you were still and sallow-pale almost inhumanly androgynous with your hair in black corona wreckage on the pillow and your mouth just open to receive whatever sacrament. You turned the pages of the notebook carefully because your fingers felt like clubs. In the third he had drawn himself as death standing just above you reaching toward your chest with the suggestion of a hand like a bolt of grayish light and you found something about it was so overwhelmingly erotic you couldn’t look at it for very long. 

“I should tell your sister you’re awake.” 

Don’t, you tried to say, don’t go. But he had gotten up and brought a glass of cloudy water which tasted rank and he had put his coat and scarf on hurriedly over his rumpled clothes. He had not yet himself gained back the substance to his face he had lost in his own illness. In not quite a kiss he bent and pressed his lips against your cheek. You could feel where in the darkness you could not see that it had been several days since he had shaved. 

“This’ll — you’ll like this.” 

He helped you turn the pages in the book. Sketch upon sketch upon sketch upon sketch like Fuseli’s _Nightmare_ of shadow and darkness and possession and on the back of one page he had done an abstractish charcoal line-drawing copy of Rops’s _Satan Sowing Seeds_. Toward the back of the book in his abominable handwriting he had scrawled what seemed a list of phrases. 

“I wrote down everything you said in your delirium.” 

When he left you realized possibly it was the kindest thing anybody had ever done for you. 

\--

When he came back the cold bright wind swept in with him and there was fresh snow on his boots. He brought broth and bread from your sister’s and helped you eat and asked you about death, about what it looked and felt and smelt like and you told him. You had started to cough up all the junk in your lungs and you couldn’t sleep and neither could he because you were coughing so much and so loudly in the tiny room and as such eventually past midnight he got up and fetched you a glass of water with a bit of laudanum. 

\--

**VI.**

You dreamed you were walking in a big house by the sea and there was guilty movement in the rooms. It was just past noon when you woke up alone in the soft darkness, and the spring in the tiny window smelled like melting, but you were still coughing. So you had a bit of laudanum in water and went with your notebook and a heel of bread and cheese to the mansard above the cafe. 

It was more crowded with people than you had ever seen it and oppressive with smoke and sweat. Someone grasped your elbow in a clammy hand, congratulated you on your recovery, commented on your thinness. It was an American novelist on the periphery of your circle who had a bit of a liking for you that you’d struggled to decipher mostly because you usually encountered him drunk. You thanked him and then you asked what was going on. 

“Willy and Fernand are here.” 

“As in Finch and Khnopff?” 

“The very same.” 

Something started winding in your gut like a golden thread but sick. Spooling out. The beginning of the feeling, you would later realize, of any number of tides going out. The sea receding, the canal silting, the fog settling. 

“They’re looking for who to invite to exhibit with Les Vingt in Brussels. They’ve already invited Gauguin and Caillebotte. There’ll be music — incredible music, there’s this string quartet — ” 

You were half-listening looking around for your (not your) whatever he was with rapidly mounting desperation. He was in his customary corner with easel and canvas but surrounded by a handful of lookers-on who were taller than him including one with reddish hair and a cropped beard, who helped him as he unrolled one of the older pieces from the tubes in which he kept them. Already he had shown the artists work from his notebooks and the big leather-bound sheaf you had given him; the books were strewn out upon the floor open to their darkest pages and whispered over by shadowy figures cast in candlelight. His eyes were nervous and he moved with the sort of flightiness he put on to hide he was intimidated but as you watched one of the artists made a joke or something and he burst into laughter. 

All of a sudden you felt like vomiting. 

“I heard,” said the novelist, uncomfortably close, watching where you were looking, “that you and the handsome one had bedded down together.” 

“The handsome — does that make me the ugly one?” 

“No, not at all, far from it. You’ve always seemed to me more of a — conquered innocent.” 

You laughed a short kind of sharp laugh that tasted like acid and decided against telling the novelist that you had altogether quit sleeping with older men who claimed they could advance your career. 

“You know,” said the novelist; he jostled you in the side with an elbow and as your ribs were tender still from coughing it hurt, “like Waterhouse’s painting of Ophelia. Or Gerome’s _Snake Charmer_ …” 

That one made you flinch a little but in the stagnant crowd you couldn’t get out of the sallow dimness and away from the novelist until someone grabbed you by the shoulder. It was the artist with the short red beard. In a golden-black tableau backlit with candleflame like something out of a medieval altarpiece the handsome one was watching you over the artist’s shoulder as were a gaggle of onlookers with their faces waxen and awestruck like the masks in a painting by the Baron Ensor. 

“You look familiar,” said the artist. 

“Yes well, he paints me a lot.” 

You watched him twitch a little in the brow. Just enough you would only have noticed if you were really looking for it. It made you want to say any number of irredeemable things, but you didn’t. 

“We live together in a very cold basement down the way. It’s like one of those caves where milkmaids used to cure cheese… Just the other day he was painting me when he thought I was dying, you see, I’ve had the — ”

“So you’re the poet.” 

“Yes,” he said, a little cold, “he is.” 

“They are lovely paintings,” the red-headed artist said. “He is — even if it is not so much your likeness it is your likeness if you understand.” 

“I’ve only seen the sketches.” 

The artist took a step back and moved you around by the shoulders so you could see the canvas. It was the best objectively of his work you had seen and you made a sound like a tiny sharp breath through your nose fortunately silenced in the loud room. Indeed the replication of you in the painting did not much look like you and nor did the personification of death look much like him but it was — a suggestion of the postures, and the closed eyes. Life was clinging on you like wet fabric. Like this an iota of the work’s eroticism had dissolved but there was still this suggestion of surrender that made your mouth dry up. And he was looking up at you like to see what you thought of it but embarrassedly as though something were legible in it and after just a moment he looked away. 

“It is like, how to articulate, those African tribespeople who believe having a photograph taken removes their soul,” said the artist. 

“He couldn’t take my soul,” you said, nauseous, attempting a smile. “Not if he tried.” 

The artist laughed; he could tell you were lying. 

\--

He was sent by telegram the following day an invitation to join Les XX in Brussels for the exhibition in May and it included an invitation for you to send your poetry to Fernand Khnopff care of the Steenstraat Hotel. As such you did and as such in a few days’ time you were also invited to the exhibition to read select among your works between performances of new pieces for string quartet and a reading by Georges Rodenbach. 

It could not end much other than badly but you could not speak about it. He went out to the cafe and you couldn’t summon the heart to join him. Instead you sat in the bed and had a glass of laudanum in water and smoked cigarettes and wrote and wrote until the fear went away and left behind it a calcified certainty. 

\--

**VII.**

Brussels in those days was livelier than Bruges by just. You and he had accrued train tickets by means steps above self-prostitution and as you couldn’t afford a room in even the seediest hotel had invited yourselves to stay with a friend of the lecherous American novelist, a Portuguese composer who stood outside the door of the room he let you still and silent while you lay on the lumpy mattress covering your mouth and nose to silence your breath watching the shadow of the feet in the door. 

The exhibition was held in a gallery of not much repute on the Rue de Cureghem. On the evening of the opening you and he were welcomed with a reserved friendliness by Khnopff and Finch who were in attendance and who introduced you both as “ze Englishmen” to the rest of the so-called Vingtistas in attendance. You stood in front of Gauguin’s _Vision After the Sermon_ until you cried. Words were floating out of it, out of the deep bloody redness of it and out of the women’s faces, out of all the rapture, but then you had brought the little dropper bottle of laudanum with you in the inside pocket of your coat and had slipped into the alley early in the festivities to drip some under your tongue in the gloaming darkness. You listened to the string group play a new piece composed by Chausson whose work you had heard but once long ago in Cambridge and you closed your eyes… 

He stood just behind you and in the candlelit crowded darkness his hand touched the small of your back under your coat. So hardly a touch electrifying in the loud silence. And his breath against your ear. His knuckle pressed the base of your spine. He was trying to tell you something neither of you could translate into language. A kind of cryptic physical secret in the nature of all the secrets you had ever shared with one another. You leaned just enough of your weight against him that you could feel him accept it. Then you leaned away again. 

They loved his work; of course they loved his work. He had sold three paintings by the end of the weekend. They loved that you were in it and yet you were present with them and they loved how he flushed and hunched his shoulders and how you laughed when someone mentioned it. They loved the faces — sublime and terrifying as masks — and they loved the flat scraped-on color and they loved the darkness and the myth, they loved the suggestion of transcendence, of surrender, they loved the shards of light that filtered from the heavens, they loved, they loved. Mildly when he thought they weren’t looking he preened a little. Rumpled his hair and his collar. You were looking at him and you were smiling but your heart was beating this funny laudanum rhythm saying, don’t forget I loved you when nobody else did. Not even yourself. 

\--

Your reading was on the fourth day and they had arranged it so you would read just before Georges Rodenbach, who was your favorite writer who lived in Bruges, and who you had once bumped into drunk at the fish market on a Thursday afternoon and tried to sleep with as a kind of personal challenge. 

You had spent every last penny in your possession before you left Bruges making a set of twenty chapbooks of your best work on the floor of the mansard studio and your artist had laughed at your optimism. He did again when you spent an hour getting dressed at the composer’s house whilst he watched you from the brocade chaise where he reclined smoking one of his hash cigarettes and reading Mallarme. As though he hadn’t spent more than an hour getting dressed for the exhibition opening. 

“What are you going to read,” he asked while you walked over sharing sips of whiskey from a flask warm from his pocket. 

“Something new.” 

“How new?” 

“I’m still writing it.” 

He laughed his bright laugh echoing in the street and it made you smile. It was warm and the sky still light and you thought if you closed your eyes he would lead you anywhere and you would follow. At the gallery you had a glass of wine and shook hands with your new friends and laughed but it sounded even to yourself like music from another room. So you went out in the alley and had a cigarette and took the little dropper bottle of laudanum from the inside pocket of your coat. Looking at it and the fine Flemish text peeling paper and the meniscus of colorless liquid inside you started itching somewhere uncertain. 

Dripped two drips under your tongue. Laughed. The cigarette… you pressed your thumb into your eye until the black space generated fireworks. 

“There you are,” he said, from the door. Clasped your shoulder — it was warm but the wedge of moon was in the grey-blue sky and the fading light slipped the stars out like jewels in slate velvet. The color rose-petal soft in a corner and dissolving like a sugar cube. The sound had come out with him and the heady smell of hashish smoke and cheers and laughter. His mouth was wine-red and just open and his face flushed with drink and warmth and his hair was too long, you were just noticing. 

“Here I am,” you said. Searched his face like a book or an artwork as though it would reveal anything to you beyond what it normally tended to — fear, aspiration, inspiration, desire. You could’ve kissed him; he looked disheveled and drunk and beautiful and for once (standing on the stoop) he was taller than you, but he wouldn’t’ve gone for it in public. 

“Miss Boch’s looking for you. You know she — her schedule.” 

“To the minute, yes.” 

You pressed the cigarette out under the toe of your boot and when you stood everything seemed to slide off the surface of the world like a photograph developing in reverse. Then it came back again. 

“Are you alright?”

“Yes. I’m ready.” 

He ushered you inside with his hand between your shoulderblades. The crowd had grown while you’d been outside and in the yellow-dim candlelight refracting slick in the paint and the polished wood floors all their faces looked like masks they were wearing over bone. Like all the skeletal mementos-mori in Rops’ sketches. Such deliberate disguises. Beside you he was speaking to Miss Boch who took a look in your eyes and read something there and looked swiftly and deliberately away. As though you were in possession of some variety of vampirism that was catching. 

You took out your cigarettes from your pocket and your notebook. Fingers trembling a little on the pages. Miss Boch clattered the metal bridge of her eyeglasses against her wine glass to call the room to attention and then somewhere inside the ringing of your ears she introduced you. 

The smattering of applause was delicate, confused, and staunchly polite. Rodenbach or something wearing his mask was across the room sketched with an expression of bored bemusement. And behind you at last your artist’s hand smoothed over your shoulder like to straighten, uselessly, your coat, oversize and tearing at the elbows, and then it slipped away. 

You looked to him for just a moment in a shattering and absolute panic like a man drowning. Which you supposed you were. At an almost violent loss in the heavy silence he took his matches from his coat pocket and lit the cigarette in your mouth and then he made this gesture like, get on with it, damn you; you’ll make a bloody fool of us all… 

So you did. 

“This is — hello. It isn’t finished. Or perhaps it is or perhaps it’ll never be finished.” 

You dared a big and toothy smile. There was a little smarmy laughter. 

“It’s about — ” 

Dared a look at him. The darkness came down over his brow like a thunderstorm. 

“Well I won’t tell you what it’s about.” 

At least the first stanza, if it could be called that, appeared verbatim in the later publication: 

_In the twilight of the hour of the truth,  
_ _which needs not be said, he waited for me at the edge of the canal and told me,  
_ _there’s a dead woman who is myself at the bottom of it, and  
_ _nine nights out of ten I have been dreaming (beside you) that I have joined her there in spontaneous oblivion.  
_ _I’ve never seen her face but I know it only could be me,  
_ _because I hear her calling in mine own voice. Meanwhile the knife  
_ _that sleeps with me is to cut myself out of her hair in the gloaming.  
_ _So in case you have been wondering why you wake up tasting metal…  
_ _Since that day I have been wandering alone in the city looking for placards to drowned girls._

\--

You lay together unspeaking unsleeping on the lumpy pallet in the spare room in the composer’s house and eventually he pulled you into his arms. The tide was going out on you and your heart was slamming still against your grist and bone trembling in the front of your shirt like a bird. He smelled like paint and his nervous sweat. And wine. For him this was remarkably tender. His hand settled on the nape of your neck thumb up behind your ear like he was feeling for your heartbeat inside your skull and you took the breast fabric of his shirt in your fist. 

You dared not move — you dared not. But you itched. “I’ve sold five paintings,” he said. Frank but bewildered. As though he weren’t certain if it were true, or what it meant. Congratulations, you tried to say, half meaning it; it wouldn’t come out. He held you closer. You recognized this from photographs as the way people clung to one another after shipwrecks. 

It would never be just the two of you in any room anymore. Even now they were with you watching from the corridor. 

Your heartbeat was echoing in your stomach a hollow chamber. He pressed his face into your neck and at last kissed you deliberately under the jaw in the soft place you had missed shaving. 

Tell it to me now, you thought, and I’ll believe you. But logically you knew you would never say it either. What could take the place of love for propriety? I devour you, I possess you. There is no false membrane between our souls anymore. My whole life before I knew you was a fiction. What is the opposite of a dream? 

\--

You woke in the night naked, sticky, sore from fucking, parched with thirst, head slamming. Itched. Thought of the brown glass dropper bottle of laudanum in the inside breast pocket of your coat which presently was draped over a chair inside-out where you’d thrown it, with your cigarettes and your notebook. 

Your spine was pressed to his, curled in, hunger-sharp bones scraping against each other like separate cogwheels. A bruise inside your hip shadowed black in the moonlight. When you thought about his and your sex you found you could never quite recreate it imaginatively even just after the fact when you thought you could still feel it in your body. In that other more vital and secret memory where it manifest as a sort of hauntedness — 

After a while you couldn’t bear it anymore and you got up and went to your coat and found the bottle. From the pallet he said your name mostly in his sleep. The moon framing the drawn curtains cast geometrically against the floor like spilt sugar. 

\--

In the early afternoon you went out to the market for coffee and eggs; the composer was out, and your train tickets back to Bruges were the morning of the day following. En route you were flagged down from the patio of a cafe across the street where having tea and pastries were the red-headed artist Fernand Khnopff and another painter you dimly recalled having met a few days previous whilst quite drunk, a big man with a curly beard. All the artists of Les XX were younger than you’d suspected (though you were still the youngest) and it had surprised you when you’d first met them at the gallery opening that most of them were not yet thirty. 

“You must have — felt a tickle, or what is your English idiom,” said Khnopff. “We were just talking about you.” 

“Nothing too salacious I hope.” 

They sat you down and flagged down the waiter for another teacup and saucer and a pain au chocolat. 

“Not at all,” said the bearded man. “About your poem from last night.” 

“James was saying that in his humble opinion you upstaged Rodenbach just a bit.”

_James_ meant the bearded man in all likelihood was the Baron Ensor whose paintings had figured sagely in your every nightmare since you had first seen them. And who your artist tended to ape rather embarrassingly — seagulls, globs of hideous color, twisted text, seas of distorted crowds — when he was feeling a dearth of inspiration. 

“I don’t know about that,” you said. In fact you didn't know in the slightest as immediately after you had finished reading you had gone back out in the alley to vomit and eventually he had come out and rubbed your back a little and then you had gone together back to the composer’s rooms. “Did he read from _Bruges-la-Morte_?” 

“No,” said Ensor, “something else, I didn’t catch it. We were in the back toasting your heath but you were nowhere to be found.”

“I was in the alley puking.” 

Khnopff laughed. “Is that where Mr — ”

“Yes, he came to hold my hair back.” 

“And you both are going back to Bruges tomorrow, yes?” When you nodded Ensor went on. “Are you going to publish that piece? What are you calling it?” 

On the train home with him asleep on your shoulder you would decide you were going to call it _Placards to Drowned Girls_. In your notebook it was titled-ish _C. Opus XXI._ “I don't know,” you told the artists. “I don't know about either.” 

“You ought to do a book collaboratively. You and — ”

“We’ve been thinking about it. Everyone tells us that, you know.” 

“Because it seems like common sense. It’s like — Georges has asked Fernand to illustrate _Bruges-la-Morte_. That also seems like common sense. But not as common sense as you two Englishmen.” 

“You’re just saying that because we’re the only two Englishmen you know.” 

Khnopff shook his head. “Because you — your work is like a dance,” he said. “Or like the strings and the winds in an orchestra.” He took his cigarettes out from the breast pocket of his coat. “You’re blushing.” 

“Not used to being flattered.” 

“You should get accustomed to it,” Ensor said. Looking away across the square toward the wind in the trees. 

\--

**VIII.**

With the proceeds from the sale of the five paintings he could afford to let studio space on Dijver, in the same bright and sunny workspace fronting on the canal where Khnopff painted when in town. The floors were cedar-red and waxen reflective and you sat on a chaise the two of you’d lucked upon at an estate sale in a shaft of shifting sun writing, notebook propped on your knees, wineglass in reach upon the floor. You watched the light fade in the window over the terra-cotta roofline like some synechdochal range of mountains and you had a cigarette and peeled the wax from the melting candles off the floor with a fingernail leaving ghostly footprints. And he painted. 

“What are you making?” 

He looked at you with the clever exasperation. As though it should be very obvious. “Things for the book.” 

“It isn’t even finished.” 

“Well I remember a lot of it from what you read.” 

He turned away from you to clean the paint from his brushes with turpentine, the way he often did when he mistakenly admitted he remembered verbatim most of your work just from hearing it once. He had painted in shocking color his own interpretation of Waterhouse’s Ophelia, skin like paper and mouth bloody red in the greenery, eyes heavy with dreaming. There was a suggestion of himself about the nose and in keeping with the first piece of the poem her arms were wrapped heavily to the shoulder with grasping weeds thick and soft as human hair. 

“It’s lovely.” 

He ignored that as he usually did. “Likely we can’t afford to print it in color but — ”

You kissed the high ridge of his cheekbone. You were alone in the high and empty room but he pulled quickly away and his eyes cast nervously to the window. From the silent street outside gaslight smeared in the glass yellow as ripe fruit. 

“The rest can be ink,” you told him. This thing had settled in your belly like a cold stone. 

\--

He went to one cafe and you went to another and ordered a bit of absinthe and after a while one of the painters from the old garret came over and offered you some cocaine powder from a pouch in the front pocket of his coat. For a while he tried to talk to you but you didn’t listen much and just said uh-huh and watched the wind outside moving in the tender buds upon the trees. The clouds that shifted and hid the moon and at last the delicate musical presence of the rain. When you looked back again the painter was gone. You took the vial of laudanum from your pocket and eyedroppered a bit onto your tongue. Some of the women employed at that establishment came over and touched your hair and your face with a gentleness that humiliated you and you must’ve said something to them you forgot because it was like you blinked and they were gone. 

\--

In the morning you woke in the cafe with your forehead on the table, aching, nauseous, head like a trainwreck, when the light split above the next-door roof and shattered through your skull. 

You gathered your things and took a bit of laudanum and went out. You did not want to go back to the basement because you doubted you could face neither him nor the sight of the empty room. So you wandered for a while on the canal and finally opened your notebook and read what you did not quite remember writing the night previous: 

_The way the light moves through the glass, and against the glass and against the night,  
_ _and the gaslight in the street yellow in the rain, like an exploding star,  
_ _like sparks or a housefire, is the way you devour me  
_ _is the way you move away from me sometimes and I feel you are my opposing magnetic field,  
_ _by which I mean you are the same as me,  
_ _and I hate but I love you. And the burning consumption of your fear.  
_ _I have been dying and I know dying. And this is dying, and I’ve walked  
_ _amongst the hospitals and heard the sound of dying. And this is dying._

You had a cigarette, craving coffee. Skipped stones in the water and stared at the sky. The sun was warm and sweet against the back of your neck so clean as to feel like drunkenness. Eventually someone sat next to you. You were not altogether surprised it was him. 

“There you are.” 

He smelled like a woman’s perfume and his hair was a clawed-through mess. And there was a bite mark at his neck inside his collar cleverly hidden enough you’d only see it if you were looking for it and of course you were looking for it. Your stomach twisted. 

“Are you hungry?” he asked. 

“No.” 

“You’ve got to eat something if you’ve been up all night drinking.” 

“I have not been.” 

“Your hands are shaking,” he said. There was a smile in his voice. “Your eyelids are purple, love.” 

_Love_. The sun slipped behind a cloud spreading a slick chill over your skin as though you had leapt into the canal. Is your dick still wet, you almost said. 

You went to the market together and bought bread and cheese and a bottle of wine. At first you were trying deliberately not to speak to him but then the sun came out again casting a pale spilled-liquor light over the street so golden it seemed almost false, or heaven-sent, and he made you laugh. He made you laugh and laugh. “What girls were you with,” you finally asked, now that it seemed funny. 

“I dunno, I don’t know their names. I don’t speak Flemish.” 

“Well was it the Fates or the Muses?” 

“The Fates.” He laughed. “Any and all sex in the time of consumption and syphilis isn’t much more than tempting the Fates.” 

With the wine and cheese and bread you went back to the studio on Dijver and you gave him your notebook so he could read through the poem and begin to plan the ink drawings. You had never been embarrassed or nervous to show its contents to him, though you would’ve been, likely, to anyone else; you had even been nervous to show your professors at Cambridge, at first, before the scandal. You had sensed, you thought, watching him read, a lost fragment of your soul in his from the moment you had first seen him asleep in your sister’s bed. In the wash of moonlight… sometimes you thought you had dreamt it. Sometimes you thought it all must’ve been a dream and sometimes you wondered, under the mushroomy duress of absinthe hallucinations, if he was even real. Or rather if he was some construct your mind had created to mask whatever terrible history or impossible truth. To unsharpen the pain and the loneliness like charcoal scratched down against flagstone. 

When he wasn’t looking you took another dose off the little dropper bottle of laudanum which was (unfortunately, unsurprisingly) nearing empty. Then you begged off him a sheet of fine silken paper and wrote, leaning against the floor, one of his hash cigarettes between your first two fingers, wine bottle close by, imprinting bloody color against the polished hardwood. 

\--

You finished it late that night: 

_I found that my own memory was encyclopedic, photographic, except  
_ _where I myself had erased it. And I found that yours  
_ _was like a faulty sieve. And when I dove into it and swam to the bottom  
_ _I swallowed every word you ever said to me, and drowned.  
_ _So I am the dead woman at the bottom of the canal who is yourself. And  
_ _the knife you sleep with is to cut yourself away from me  
_ _when I have dragged you down again into the darkness and the gloaming,  
_ _when death and I are calling for you in your own voice,  
_ _by which I mean you are the same as me. And so when you cut me,  
_ _as you always do,  
_ _you yourself do bleed.  
_ _So in case you have been wondering why you wake up tasting metal,  
_ _I hope you understand it is only by parasitic order. By the rule  
_ _and regulation of self-preservation:  
_ _what does love mean if not a guarantor of revenge?_

You looked at it. Your hand was cramped and shaking and you stood up and stretched and on a violent whim grasped the neck of the empty wine bottle and shattered it against the floor. 

“What in hell’s — ”

“I’ve finished it.” 

“Have you really?” 

You kicked the largest piece of glass into the corner where it shattered further. The dark green glass like shards of mirror. The joy you felt about it, you would interrogate later, was kind of false and empty. “Yes,” you said, “yes I have.” 

“I’ve finished something too.” 

You came over and beheld it when the ink was still wet on it so dense and thick and shining as to seem like blood. The two androgynous figures were elongated and almost grotesque in their stark forms and lines, sharp black shading and a bleached vacancy, expressions clipped and angry. They seemed to lift out of their patternless no-space and out of the page itself and you didn’t dare breathe in their direction. 

He always ignored you when you said, it’s lovely. So you said his name. 

“Hmm.” 

“It kills me — it does. It’s like a dull blade. When you read my mind like this.” 

He was cleaning his brushes without looking at you but there was this satisfied expression on his face he was doing his best to hide behind his hair. “That’s what it’s all about. Isn’t it?” 

I love you and you will only, you can only ever be really truly mine, you didn’t say; he took you home, you had forgotten already about the night before and the girls; you were always doing this, you were always rewriting it inside your head. There was a bit of cocaine powder left over from Brussels and you snorted it off each other’s thumbnails. Next thing you knew you were lying on the cold stone floor naked in front of the woodstove and he was saying, hold bloody fucking still, laughing and laughing, he had his thinnest brush in hand and a little pot of black ink. It’s cold, you told him, it’s fucking, fucking cold, and you laughed. He held his hand over your mouth and traced one very thin ticklish line of ink from the hollow of your throat all the way down over your chest to your navel, and you seized up and knocked the ink over and it spilled all over the floor and he punched you hard in the shoulder so you punched him back hard in the shoulder and you tried to stand up but your foot slipped in the ink and you fell on your ass on the floor. 

“Are you going to stay fucking still now.” 

You nodded. You could feel the spill of it cold and slick under you and your breath was coursing through you and burning and burning and burning. He pressed his hand over your heart where it left against your skin a shocking black print. Inside you it was beating desperately at the cage of ribs like a prisoner. 

\--

In the morning you woke in a nest of ruined blankets on the floor looking like a Rorschach test. The spilled ink had dried against the floor staining the flagstones like evidence of some monochromatic murder and it had stuck in and matted the fine hairs on your arms and legs and it was handprinted all over your body. You sat up and were lightheaded with thirst and practically aching for another dose of laudanum and you watched him for a while breathing softly asleep on the bare stained mattress so too now ink-printed all over gesturally from his movements in his dreams. 

You had a cigarette and dressed and looked at yourself in the mirror. Luckily it wasn’t so bad on your face (there was a single thumbprint just in the center of your lower lip and looking at it a chill passed through you) but it wrapped around your neck dark and livid as bruises on a strangled corpse and brutally obviously with a similar referent. The smeary print of this thumb stretched across all the soft machinery. So you buttoned your shirt and coat up all the way and put a scarf on, and his soft brown kid leather gloves because it was worst on your hands. Then you went out to the shops. It was a pale and cool morning and the dark heavy seafog filtered the sun through it golden-brown as Belgian beer against the buildings and the canals and the damp cobblestones. 

First off you went to the art store and bought another bottle of ink. The cashier was a painter who had appeared occasionally at the old studio above the cafe and he asked after your artist and your health and et cetera and he asked about the show in Brussels and he said he had heard, just a rumor he said, but he had heard the two of you were planning to publish a book together. 

“It’s going to be a long poem by me and some ink drawings of his. Hence — ” you indicated the bottle on the counter with your pointer finger; you’d had to take the gloves off to scrounge for change in your pockets and your hands looked like a corpse’s or a coal miner’s. But the cashier didn’t mention it. 

You went next to the grocery and bought cheese and bread and wine and pears on a whim and then you went to the pharmacy next door to buy another vial of laudanum. Waiting just in front of you in line unfortunately was the lecherous American novelist who greeted you by name and with a grasping clammy handshake. “You’re not ill again, I hope,” he said. 

“I’ve just got this cough that won’t go away.” 

The novelist looked at the little vial in your hand and then he looked at your mouth where you knew the little inkprint was. Then, slowly, at your neck inside the scarf where the fabric had slipped away showing just a ridge of the black handprint. Drawing whatever collected inferences. “You know,” he said. Something almost accomplished about the set of his mouth. “It’s a great deal cheaper just to smoke opium.” 

“It’s not — it’s for my cough.” 

“You must know about the back room at Archibald’s,” said the novelist, ignoring you. He referred to an opium den most of your circle frequented but which you had heretofore avoided. “It’s much cheaper than that stuff,” said the novelist, “and it works better. For your cough.” 

The pharmacist called for the next customer. “Good day, then,” said the novelist, stepping away. He was looking at your throat as though you had presented it for cutting. You almost turned tail and went for the door but the thought of leaving without the laudanum made you nauseous. 

\--

** IX.  **

_Placards to Drowned Girls_ was published as a chapbook by a local press in early August 1889. The house was willing to gamble on twenty copies printed with the frontispiece in color and the cover engraven and inlaid with gold, to be sent to special friends and patrons around the city and in Brussels and in London. The rest would be put for sale at a modest number of Bruges booksellers. 

You had sent a manuscript and prints of the illustrations to Khnopff in Bruges and to the Baron Ensor hoping to get a review in Les XX’s annual journal which was customarily pressed in July. A message was conveyed back to you at home from Khnopff not a week later commending you both on your work and asking to review it. And not very long after that you ran into him at the fish market — high as hell in shirtsleeves in the warm summer rain debating mussels or oysters. 

“It is truly a staggering piece of work,” Khnopff said. You walked with him along the canal swinging the oysters in their net bag and smoking his fancy Parisian cigarettes. “It was so — I ripped up everything I had been drawing for Georges’ novel. The way you and he have managed to tell the same story at the same time in different languages is miraculous. I don’t understand it.” 

“It’s mostly his brilliance and not — ”

“No, don’t say that. You wrote precisely what you wanted him to draw and he drew it. But you wrote it within and without the words — I cannot articulate. Like I said it is miraculous.” He dropped the ember of his cigarette and pressed it out beneath the toe of his boot. “If you do not mind my asking how long have you known each other?” 

“Are you going to put all of this in the review?” 

He laughed. “No, no it’s just — my own curiosity. I do not write about the personal lives of artists in the review; it degrades the mythology.” 

Perhaps if you were less high you would have hesitated. But before coming to the fish market you had had two eyedrops of laudanum under the tongue and you felt loose and floating like every historical weight had been lifted from your shoulders and from the room in the back of your skull… And so you said, “Since last October.” 

“October ’88?” 

“Yes.” 

“Ten months ago?” 

You laughed. “Yes. Do you not believe it?” 

“You must’ve known each other in another life.” 

“Yes, he was with me, you know, in the ships at Mylae…” 

Before this lifetime, you sometimes thought, you and he had died as soldiers in the American Civil War. And somewhere in some corner of battlefield unphotographed (you had seen the gruesome images in the London papers growing up and had saved them folded tightly in your notebooks) your bones (your previous bones) were tangled together and rotting. And before that you had both died in the cholera epidemic in London and before that you had both died when Napoleon’s grand conquering force ground to a halt at Waterloo. Somewhere in the middle you had frozen to death together in the far icy northlands under Franklin or Beechey or Barrow, and sometime before that you had been mutinied upon with Henry Hudson and marooned in a shallop behind the _Discovery_. You had become certain you and he been living and dying together when people fought one another with swords and arrows. And you would be living and dying together when people fought one another in outer space or whatnot. Absinthe dreams he called them when you told him. You had found something not long ago you had written when very high and forgotten about: _We have to live at the same time it is integral to balance of universe_. 

“I think it will do very well,” Khnopff said. “Your book.” 

“I’m not getting my hopes up.” 

“It would be safe to. And you know I would not tell you that unless I meant it. Perhaps you will not become Puvis de Chavannes overnight. But it will do well among our set and those Parisian Decadents and all the others who are curious which are more than I think you suppose. It is a fair codification of what we have all been trying — of Spiritus Mundi, at least in Belgium, at least right now. ‘The Ideal clothed in a perceptible form,’ as Mr Moreas would say.” 

“The Ideal.” 

“Yes, yes, love and death, the love that is death, in the city that is death — dreaming, memory, all of it.” 

Your mouth felt dry. The weight and the pressure had begun slowly like tea in hot water to filter through you again. 

“Have you thought about what you will do? If it sells well will you go to Paris?” 

“I’ve never been.” 

“Ah, well you should go at least once, if you can, and they would love you there, certainly they would. Georges would house you both — ” 

“Georges?” 

“Seurat… we had his work this year at the show. The _pointilliste_ , do you remember? He could help you find the _salons littéraires_ but mostly he will take you out to get screaming drunk. And this I tell you from experience.” 

You laughed but found you didn’t mean it. And Khnopff could tell. 

“It is startling when things change is it not? When what — you are doing this work in yourself for yourself and you know it’s good. And you are lucky because you have another who is so close to you who knows your work is good. But now — it is startling when it gets larger. And it will be different. But there are things that cannot — that will not change. Things that are fixed.” 

“Nothing’s — nothing can stay the same forever.” 

“Really? Lest you forget we are in Bruges… this city has not changed since 1500 when the Zwin silted.” 

It was not so comforting; it had changed: it had lost most everything, and the people in it had changed, and the things they did and the things they made had changed, so really it was still the same only on its cold slate surface under the cold slate sky. And the sameness of it was no sameness to aspire to because it was a sameness that spoke overwhelmingly to death. And as such it seemed to speak to whatever old adage: only dead things could stay the way they were forever. 

You said goodbyes and walked home. Darkness filtered into your mind through the back of it vomitously thick as ink and you began to feel afraid. Things would be different and they would be different quickly. It seemed likely there would be money and that people would know you by name. For you this had always seemed an impossible but vaguely interesting side effect of writing things that people liked and yet in your more pessimistic moments you had entertained the notion that perhaps it was the only reason he made art at all. Logically you knew it wasn’t true because he woke up in the night sometimes to paint and when you watched him at his work you could see how much he had to do it. And it made you angry or frightened or envious when he looked at you and his face was very different and bore none such conviction. Nor devotion. You could not unremember how he had preened at the show and how embarrassed he had looked when you had caught him at it. 

When you got to the basement he wasn’t there. And he had left no note. And he had straightened up and piled his books and sketches precariously on the shelves beside the hardly-used dishware and the scant novels and chapbooks you owned between the two of you and the tin box of fine Earl Grey tea your sister had given you for your birthday. 

_He’s going to leave you._

Battering beating slamming around in your head like a drum a heartbeat or a trapped bird. 

_He’s going to leave you, he’s going to leave you. Verlaine left Rimbaud. He’s going to leave you._

You turned around and locked the door again and went out into the street. The rain had moved away and the street was wet but the sky showed fools’ pockets where the clouds shifted in the distant wind. You walked past the storage garret where you had lived for a time when you had first come to Bruges and the creeping mangy black dog that walked with you, inside you, spoke in your sister’s voice: 

“You are after all only a bloody madman and all mum and da have ever tried is to bloody help you. But you won’t help yourself.” She took a deep breath and she pinched the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. She had been biting her nails in actualization of a bad habit from her childhood, and she had filed them neatly to try to hide it but you could tell. “It’s sick — you’re sick. Haven’t you realized? It’s horrible, how you want to be loved.” 

You were trying not to listen. You were watching out the window because he was standing in the square waiting for you smoking a cigarette and you were going to go to the cafe. He was standing out there in his thrift shop army coat and you realized you couldn’t remember how long it had been since either of you had slept. It had begun to flurry and the snow was catching in his hair and he glared daggers at every passerby who dared to give him even a fleeting curious look. 

“You bring out the very worst in one another and now I feel like — like I don't know either of you anymore. Are you listening to me?” 

You put your forehead against the cold window and thought, _no_. But you were. 

“You’ll end up dead in the bloody gutter. Before the year is out.” 

When you turned around you saw she had covered her mouth with her hand and she was crying. Her eyes shifted past you, toward the door. So you left. Outside he saw your look and grasped you sympathetically by the back of the neck like a lioness with cubs or something. You knew your sister was watching from the window so you let yourself lean into him as much as he would let you before he took a step away. 

“Let’s go get a bottle of wine, yeah?” 

“Yeah.” 

So you went to Archibald’s. And so you went there now. And so you bypassed the front room entirely even as a few friends called after you and you went as if drawn by a hook behind your navel through the filthy velvet curtains in the back and down the rickety iron staircase into the basement. 

In the darkness there was a young woman you thought you knew vaguely sitting at a stool holding a shortbread tin which rattled with change and when she gestured to you for money you could see that her hands and arms to the elbow bore the spotty brownish markings of syphilis. She had been pretty or she would have been pretty were she present. Her eyes and mouth were open and they were vacant or absent and she seemed not to see you. Or she saw through you. And she waved you onward. 

Inside the room was fragrant-bright with heady and delirious smoke and shadowy figures had gathered on grimy pillows and collapsing furniture to share puffs from several Turkish pipes bubbling with burning embers. One of them was the American novelist who caught eye of you and called your name from where he lay reclining languorously with his head in someone’s lap and his shirt undone halfway down the chest. 

“Come here, my boy,” he said, sitting up. Something in your gut recoiled but not enough. He rested his hand high up between your shoulderblades. The flat of his forearm pressed against your back and you were so close to him you could smell his sweat cloying with the drug and almost sweet. 

_Is it your first time_ , from the past. 

_Of course it is._ The remnant of laughter still in the other voice. _Of course it is, of course it is_. 

“I’ve been hearing about your book,” said the novelist. He was trying for soothing. 

“I don’t want to talk about the book.” 

You wished you could excise him from yourself. Like a tumor. Reach inside and cut around the swollen yellow grist of it and let the blood blood blood drain yourself of the poison-black wound… it would feel you imagined like vomiting when you had had too much to drink and for a moment you felt almost baptismally alive before the nausea returned. And you would have to cut out every memory or else it would come back, like cancer did. And perhaps in the next life if you were allowed another you would be rid of him. Even if it meant the end of the very world. 

You had given him so much of you there was none of you left to yourself. All that remained in your very soul was the devouring consuming desperate obsession and the certainty that when he pulled away you would bleed to death. And you knew he would. And you thought you finally understood in some special way what Rimbaud had been referring to when he’d written _je est un autre._ I is another. The self is another — 

The novelist pressed the mouthpiece of the pipe into your hand like an instrument and it was warm. He was half holding you, like a nurse, fingers at the nape of your neck where your hair was damp with a fevered sweat. _Take your medicine and sleep_ … 

So you did. And you did. 

\--

**X.**

You thought you were lying in the sun and the garden smelled of roses. His hands against your face and in your hair. You could tell they were his hands from the calluses and from the smell of him like hash and paints, and his unwashed hair. A little spilt wine. And his sweat, rich as earth. From the churchyard they were singing a song you didn’t think existed yet: 

_lord can you hear me when i call  
_ _lord can you hear me when i call_

“Come with me,” he said, “come back with me.” 

“I can’t.” 

“Why can’t you?” 

“You won’t have me, back with you.” 

It didn’t matter so much now in this dream kingdom. 

“Who says I won’t?”

“Everyone.” 

“But yourself most of all.” 

“Yes. Myself most of all.” 

“You have problems,” he said, but his voice was soft and full of love. “You’re a bloody madman.” 

“So’re you.” 

“Yes.” 

“Jesus. Do you remember the first time — ”

“Yes. Of course yes.” 

“You’re mad. I thought you were going to murder me.” 

“Only in the medieval metaphoric sense.” 

Your eyes were closed. He ran his hands through your hair and you began to realize it was too tender to be real. And too warm to be real. And there were no roses. 

“Carl.” 

“Hmm.” 

“Don’t — ” 

The light manifest in the darkness first like the sun through the stretching cotton clouds. 

“Don’t leave me.” 

“I’m trying — ” 

You blinked. In the darkness the smoke was so heavy and thick as to feel like some ghostly life around you. Like something out of a Poe story. You coughed and stretched a little but it was like your body wasn’t real. It was attached to your consciousness with a weak glue that was fraying. 

“There he is,” said the novelist. “There you are.” It was his hand that was in your hair but you could no longer be bothered to care. He pressed the mouthpiece into your hand again. You had forgotten about almost everything. 

\--

Eventually you went home and sat in the bed and wrote some weirdo nonsense and had a glass of wine and some bread and cheese. He didn’t come back and when it started to trouble you you took a little laudanum but about twenty minutes later it started to chew at you again. So you took some more and then a little more until you passed out. Then when you woke up it was dawn and he was puttering around making tea. 

“Morning.” 

He turned toward you from the stove. Thankfully you had managed to get the little vial into your pocket before you’d fallen asleep. “Morning. Thought I’d see you last night.” 

“Where were you?” 

“Just, there was a party at Laetitia’s.” So he had slept over with someone. Probably with Laetitia. She was a showgirl at one of the classier establishments who had once made none-too-cryptic intimations she would like to _menage a trois_ with the both of you. “She said she’d invited you.” 

“I forgot. I was at Archibald’s.” 

“With who?” 

“Who’s that novelist, the American — ”

He turned away toward the stove again. “Right. I don’t know his name.” 

You had a cuppa together and cigarettes and biscuits sitting in the bed and he talked about the party and he said people had asked about the book. And you told him about running into Khnopff. 

“So he’s going to give us a good review then?” 

That same thing twisted. Ever that same itchy hungry fucking thing. “Yes, he said he would. He said it was, what, ‘the Ideal clothed in a perceptible form.’” 

“Jesus.” 

“He said we should go to Paris and stay with Seurat.” 

“Really? He thinks it’s that good?” 

“Yes.” 

“Well maybe then we should.” 

You leaned your aching head against the bedpost. Something in it felt like the canal in the winter iced with heavy blocks of slush. 

“Alright?” he asked. 

“My head’s a nightmare.” 

“I imagine it usually is.” 

“Ha ha,” you said, but you shut your eyes and opened your mouth a little and willed him to kiss you. He would sometimes without prompting when you were hungover just out of pity and because he thought you looked like a lost sick child. Like you weren’t sure entirely what you’d done to deserve how terribly you felt. 

Instead he got up; you felt the bed dip. Your heart twitched. 

_He’s going to leave you._

It was like a whispering sing-song taunt now. 

“Are you going to go and paint?” 

He shook his head. “Out to the cafe for a chocolate or something.” 

His hangers-on would be waiting there prepared to bat their eyelashes and laugh at everything he said. 

“Want to come?” 

You said no thanks and that you were going to the studio to write. But instead you went back to Archibald’s. 

\--

**XI.**

When you received your first cut of sales from the book in September you spent maybe three days straight in the basement at Archibald’s beside yourself high and when at last you stumbled back home you found all his things were gone. All the papers and the paints and inks and his fancy sweets and his army coat and his fine shoes and all his books and manuscripts and prints and his beloved Redon monograph. Even the smell in the room was brittle and stale and there was none of his sweet organic lifeness in it and it was damp and dank and cold. You put some wood in the stove and sat on the bare mattress tracing your ragged fingernails over the inky prints and the stains and you had a cigarette and read the note he had left: 

_Heard about a room on Pandreitje for cheap. Looked for you to try and tell you but I had to say yes so anyway here we are. Come on by the studio when you can. C._

Funny how everything felt like a dull blade. Such incredible detachment. You could have watched him stab you through the heart with a hunk of rusted metal and you would have felt not much more. 

After a while you got up and broke a bottle of wine against the floor. Sat in it and wept. The tide was rushing out on you. It got worse every time. When you got up you were dizzy and there was a shard of glass in the heel of your hand. You took some laudanum and wrote into its dissolving. 

_my heart, my  
_ _there is no heart. there is  
_ _(when i was 6 yrs old the doctor cut my tonsils into a ceramic bowl  
_ _i remember watching them spit and slither out of my mouth like a miscarriage)  
_ _there is no heart they cut that out too into a ceramic bowl  
_ _oxygen velvet red, thick as ink  
_ _and ropy, in strands  
_ _and i am looking at it thinking good god once that thing was inside me. the same or not the same as you have been inside me  
_ _and after all i ever gave and you ever gave after all the ink spilt and the wine and hunger and laughter and blood after all of it to think it could be cut out a couple strands of grist with a razor and coughed into a sterile bowl,  
_ _and preserved in formaldehyde and kept in a dusty jar on a shelf in a cabinet of curiosities with myriad assorted colonial relics,  
_ _can you believe he kept it living for so long starven of any love?_

You read it back over and hated it and almost burned it. But something stopped you, and you hid it away in the dresser drawer. The wine had dried upon the floor and your clothes and smelled like vinegar. For a while you in lay in the bed but couldn’t sleep. You were starving but with the change you had left it was between bread and cheese at the market and another visit to Archibald’s. And you knew if you went there you wouldn’t feel hungry for much longer. 

\--

In a week’s time he called your name out in the street and ran to you shoes clattering on the cobblestones. And embraced you. You were still high enough you didn’t feel much only the ghost of breath on your cheek and his smell (hash and paints and earth) and your love for him was diffuse through you like chiffon cloth and it weighed nothing. 

“I thought you might come by.” 

“I’ve been busy.” 

“Where have you been? No one’s seen you.” 

“I went to Ostend,” you lied. “Just to get away.” 

“I’m going to go paint,” he said, “will you come?” 

You went together to the studio. He was telling you all about the new room on Pandreitje and about Laetitia and Annabel and the rest of them and then he asked you about Ostend and you made up some bullshit about a girl and a house shaped like a shell beside the sea and from the beach and the pier when you walked there together unspeaking you thought you could see or at least smell the shores of Dover or Margate across the widening channel. 

“Could you see the lights at night?” 

“I think so. But they could’ve been ships or something, I don’t know.” 

He took out his hash cigarettes and offered you one. “Annabel said we should go to London. She knows somebody who knows somebody who knows Oscar Wilde.” 

“Who?” 

“You remember, he wrote that essay, _The Decay of Lying…_ you hated it as I remember. He’s one of those aesthetes or whatever they call themselves.” 

“I never want to go back to England.” 

“I know you don’t. Neither do I. I’d rather go to Paris.” 

“So would I rather.” 

He turned to you; there was a nervous smile in the corner of his eye. “Save your bloody cut of the sales then.” 

Like this you thought you could intend to. Until you arrived at the studio and it was swarming with people — so many they were sitting on the floor in the patchwork quiltlike cloth of sun through the wide windows, sharing bottles of wine and pastries and chocolate, smiling and laughing, reciting poetry, men and women alike in expensive Parisian finery smoking hash and clove cigarettes all looking like some extended and transposed _Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe_ — and they erupted when they saw you both in the door. 

“He’s brought the poet,” someone said to someone else in a kind of glaring stage whisper. You turned on your heel to go but he stopped you by the shoulder and fixed you in the eyes. All the sound faded out. You were certain he was speaking to you inside your mind but you couldn’t hear it, because you were too high. Then he looked away again. A glass of wine was pressed into your hand and an attractive and unidentifiable pastry. He introduced you around where he knew their names and you drank the glass of wine but couldn’t bring yourself to eat the pastry so you gave it to a girl who accepted it as though you had given her the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. Then you sat on the floor beside him like a dog and took your notebook and pen out from the breast pocket of your coat. Flipped past every broken-hearted abstract thing you had scrawled out from your blood and guts in the past week and smoothed open a new page. All around they were pretending not to watch either of you but they were watching both of you with glances they thought surreptitious over their shoulders and around the room. Only the girl you had given the pastry to watched you openly, as though she were watching an orchestra performance or something, and eventually you realized it was likely she was also high, and you tried to remember if you had seen her before at Archibald’s or elsewhere. 

Directly after this, you decided, as soon as you could get away without causing a scene, or as soon as the tide went out on you enough you didn’t care about causing a scene, you were going to go there and you were going to find the motleyest possible crew of hopheaded decadents and degenerates and from this point onward whenever he wanted to speak to you your own crowd of hangers-on would mediate. And God they would be monstrous. They would be led by your executor, the American novelist, and your aide de camp, the syphilitic girl who took change at the door. They would accompany you as a sort of manic and gleeful heralding force of clowns as in the Baron Ensor’s _Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889_. And for all his societal aspirations you in turn would seduce the underworld as it had seduced you. It was almost pointedly perfect: surface and symbol. 

You wrote notes for a poem about this and then you wrote a single line: 

_Burn this body when you’re done with it._

Then you stood, and he looked up at you. Against the milky white page he had been sketching the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, its buttresses and stretching spires straining against the featureless sky. The shadow was stretching out in it and it looked like a filament of nightmare from a ghost story. The room had silenced and now truthfully they were watching. In the corner of your eye the wound that was your mind could not fathom the reality of them. “’s lovely,” you said. 

“Are you leaving?” 

“I have errands.” 

What sort, he wanted to ask, but he didn’t say. “I’ll see you later then.” 

“Yes.” 

He clasped your hand in both of his. “Do come by again.” 

His eyes were very soft. His thumb moving in a slow fan over the veins in your wrist. Christ but you could’ve written six novels about all the things you could tell he wanted to say but he never said. 

“I will.” 

“Will you really.” 

“Yes, yes I will.” 

You left and after a few moments realized you were accompanied by the girl you had given the pastry. She had since eaten it but there were flecks of crumb at the corner of her rouged lips. “Where are you going?” she asked. 

“Archibald’s.” 

“Me too.” 

In step beside you she smelled like some strange burnt sugar perfume, cheap and thin, and the telltale blitzed-out smoke of opium; it had caught in her hair and the ratty tulle fabrics she wore under her black cloak. In another moment she dared to hold your elbow with a nervous pink-gloved hand. “What were you writing,” she said. 

“Something horrible.” 

“ _Ouais_ , I could tell.” 

It had been so long since a girl had held your elbow. Since Cambridge probably. 

“You did not know he was bringing you to meet us all. Into the thresher.” 

“No.” 

“Hmm.” 

You went down together into the basement down the rickety stairs and she paid your way. You started to thank her but she shook her head and shushed you. Distributed around the pipes were a few comatose figures you’d seen before but none of them, to your relief, was the novelist. The girl sat dignifiedly beside you and took her cloak off and arranged her skirts around herself and started unwrapping the mouthpiece and the cord from the body of the hookah with a practiced elegance. At first you thought she had syphilis marks on her arms but on a closer look they were small and delicate tattoos smudging into her skin amidst her freckles. She wiped her mouth of pastry crumbs with the back of her wrist and then she took a hit, and she passed you the mouthpiece. 

“What do you want from him,” she said. Her eyes and voice were far away. Like a dream — like listening to a church choir singing midnight mass from the courtyard, in the bitter snow. “What do you think he wants from you?” 

My fucking soul, you thought; his fucking soul… 

It passed and filtered through you like a bolt of soft and unremitting lightning. 

\--

Dawn was like a train or something bright and screaming and something close smelt like burnt sugar. It wasn’t so much that you woke up as that your consciousness rearrived from wherever it had gone and began to negotiate and interrogate your surroundings with pathetic difficulty. The first thing was that the girl was beside you and that you were both naked. The second was that the tattoos on her arms were shaped like tiny eyes. She was very warm and very slender, and your arm was around her back and shoulders, and she had propped herself up on an elbow, but she was watching at the door. You had woken up because she had woken up. You started to say something but she pressed her index finger softly over your lips. 

The room was dark and dank with smoke and the light was coming like a knife through a gap in the musty marsala-wine curtains onto the stained hardwoods. On the shelves around beneath the gilded moulding that bound the greenish floral wallpaper to the yellow-ringed stucco ceiling were an ecstasy of books. The place you were lying wasn’t so much a bed as an overlarge velvet sofa. And just beside you on a claw-footed coffee table papers were stacked crowded with typewritten notes and marginalia scrawling, and beside them like a cop’s truncheon was a long mahogany opium pipe. 

_God fucking damn it_ , you thought. 

Your body was starting to fade in like a tuning orchestra but your memory wouldn’t quite come on. _What do you think he wants from you,_ you remembered. Her accent was French or something — and you could not remember what you had said. Certainly you had said something but now you could not even fathom what it might have been. And you could not fathom any of the middle of it and you were glad. Something else to be closed up in that box and to be devoured. 

Someone was speaking in the other room. The girl’s other hand was at the nape of your neck softly combing through your hair. You turned your face into her chest and closed your eyes. “Have another hit, _cherie_ ,” she whispered, “if it troubles you.” 

\--

**XII.**

Just outside the city in a handsome neighborhood called Ter Berge lived a young landowner and his housewife who had painterly aspirations and was known to sometimes frequent the studios and cafes shyly, accompanied by her beautiful and severe Moroccan maid. Your artist had painted the pair of them on occasion (the housewife had been a great beauty until she was perhaps your age at which point she had had smallpox, which had marred her features mildly such that she always wore a veil of lace or tulle) and you sometimes suspected he had slept with one or both of them. After all the husband certainly had affairs the salacious details of which were rather public knowledge, especially when you were friends of the Bruges dancehall girls. But it seemed he felt some commendable urge to pay his wife back for all his indiscretions and one of the ways in which he did so was by allowing her to host Parisian salons of art and poetry and music in their home, which was begrudgingly lovely and maintained meticulously so as to look like some medieval rectory. 

To this salon you were invited in November 1889 to read a poem which had appeared in the British periodical _The Nineteenth Century_ thanks to the efforts of your publisher (you had not realized he was serious about it until he had given you a copy of the magazine and you had held it in your hands and seen your name on the cover with a slow-developing shock and awe) and he had been invited too to show for the first time his series of illustrations of Bruges’ ancient churches. They were by all accounts masterful but you found you hated them and everything about them and looking at them made you want to vomit. And so you invited to accompany you the girl with the eye tattoos, and the American novelist, and anyone else down in the basement at Archibald’s who could motivate themselves to their feet and out of town to a gathering where hors d’oeuvres had been promised. 

It had been more than a year since you had arrived in Bruges but thinking about it made you sick. Thinking about most things made you sick so you didn’t think about them. You couldn’t remember the last time you slept in your own bed. And you couldn’t remember the last time you’d seen him except that you had fought, but you couldn’t remember what you’d fought about. Sometimes you would wake to find in the night you had been writing and what was legible of it was quite good but you felt about it the way you felt about reading other people’s poetry in the periodicals and reviews. It didn’t quite belong to you and as such for a while you didn’t use any of it. 

The poem that was in _The Nineteenth Century_ you had been considering the last one you’d written with any faith in his love for you or your love for him as anything other than a crutch or a wound. So you had agreed to read it on the condition you could also read one of your newer ones and the housewife had agreed. Only the girl with the eye tattoos had seen this poem and she had read it out of your notebook while she helped you get dressed for the salon. “Hurts,” she said, when she handed it back, and not much else. 

You put the book in the inside pocket of your coat. You didn’t think she really liked your work at all, but then again it seemed she didn’t really like anything but smoking opium. 

“What do you mean _hurts_.” 

“He’s going to be there right?” 

You didn’t answer. In fact you weren’t sure and you kind of hoped he wouldn’t be. 

“Every sword has two edges,” she said, handing you your scarf. 

\--

He was in fact there, but he arrived after you with his hangers-on. You had been staring for twenty minutes or so at a painting you’d never seen before which had to be by Khnopff, because of how much laudanum you’d had in the carriage. The rest of your party had retired to the couches and chaises for hors d’oeuvres and wine as the housewife’s society friends shifted away from them with a nervous politeness. Except the girl with the tattoos who stood beside you watching around the room a little protectively, and when she saw him in the door she said, “Ah.” 

You cringed like a painful full-body cringe. Just to feel — he had something evil or animal about him you could sense from across the room. All the little hooks he had in your heart and soul tugging at once as some medieval torture device. Between where he was and where you were something was bleeding and smelled like rot and everybody else in that room could not tear their eyes away from it. 

“You shouldn’t read either of those poems,” said the girl, lips against your ear. She had changed her perfume from the burnt-sugar stuff so now she smelled like burnt roses. “You’ll regret it.” 

Khnopff’s painting in the salon he later told you was called “My Heart Cries for the Past.” The city was in it as a sort of gestural mirror of itself dissolving in dreamlike sketchwork and a wash of bland and rusty color. The canal was whitish and glassy dragging the rain down from the sky and you watched it longingly as the lanternlight shifted on it trying desperately to slip inside it and ignore reality even as the girl with the tattoos left your side and went to confer with the novelist about something across the room. When someone touched your shoulder you jumped. But it was only the housewife’s Moroccan maid. “It’s almost time,” she said. Then when she saw your face she backed off a little. “You want a cup of tea?” 

You had a hard time getting your voice to work which kept happening more and more often lately. But “Yes,” you told her, “yeah, yes, please.”

By the time she came back with it you had snuck off and had a bit more laudanum and most of the room and most of your mind had lost shadow and dimension. And the world was almost an entirely peaceful flat even though he was watching you across the room and pretending he wasn’t and his paintings were watching you across the room because they had nowhere else to watch and the window-eyes in them were a little mocking. 

“I’ll tell Miss to introduce you if you’re ready now,” she said. 

“I am,” you said. Nothing can hurt me, you were thinking; if I shot myself in the gut now it wouldn’t hurt me. And so you knew what you were going to read and you could have laughed because it was so terrible and so perfect. 

From the chaises they had populated the girl with the tattoos and the novelist were watching you with a nervous skepticism. The housewife clattered her fork against her wine glass and presented you with an embarrassingly glowing spiel that would have made you blush had you had more of your wits about you. His hangers-on were watching you and then him and then you again and then him again because he had looked away now to take his turn trying to dissolve into Khnopff’s painting. 

“Hello,” you said, twice before it worked. You were looking at the back of his head across the room. His hair curled delicately against the nape of his neck where not so long ago someone had cut it crookedly. “Miss asked me to read the piece that was in _the Nineteenth Century_ but — I can hardly look at it anymore so. This is something new and it doesn’t have a name.” 

It was published the Summer following as “Et in Arcadia Ego” in Les XX’s July periodical: 

_to interrogate what whispers in the very darkness  
_ _when you won’t see me:  
_ _it gets near me heavy and soft as silt or flour and has no smell,  
_ _and the self of me who’s met it is reified  
_ _night after night from the false grave with no memory.  
_ _but death fucks i think better than you at first managed  
_ _in the halcyon time of it if there ever was one,  
_ _death takes hold of the skeins and cords and pulls taut  
_ _and snaps like reigns —_

He was watching you now across the room positively murderous. One by one it was as if all the rest of them burnt out like stubs of candles. And the room burnt out, and the house, and the world, and it was the two of you alone in a white room. 

_and if the holy bronze-cast of my love is you, and your peacefulness asleep  
_ _in the time of death and syphilis, and if i have mostly only ever known you  
_ _bloody about the eyes, and jealous of death, longing-sick,  
_ _envious of suicides’ most inventive methods immortalized to newsprint,  
_ _does that make me a liar?  
_ _poor fucking sod they will say in the papers when i die,  
_ _his heart killed him, or his liquor or his other chemicals besides,  
_ _or a jealous knife or a rotting swelling devouring in the brain whichever,  
_ _and him so young. and innocent of demeanor with eyes closed.  
_ _and him despoiled so young,  
_ _and haunted, and mad, if you believe the keen vibration of rumor,  
_ _and all yet he ever wrote about was love,  
_ _while it is indemonstrable he ever loved anyone but death  
_ _or that anyone but death ever loved him in turn,  
_ _at least by the standard of any reasonable man…_

\--

The applause at the end was polite if mystified. Miss announced another reader and you shook a couple hands and excused yourself for a cigarette and the dregs of your mint tea, sitting on the steps on the patio in the wet fog. Your head hurt and you were thinking about the vial of laudanum in your pocket and about Khnopff’s painting and about the wedge of moon shedding this blue alien milk-light through the tulle veil of the clouds. Through the wide windows the lanternlight inside writ their shadows large and misshapen as golems upon the wet and colorless grass. You were thinking of a painting by someone, maybe Hodler, and digging for your matches inside your coat pocket, and then all manifest quick as a camera flashing someone slammed out through the patio door and came toward you in three long strides and kicked you hard square in the small of the back. 

Not so much pain (too high) but pressure slammed up through your spine and your skull. You were too slow to get your feet under you and half-fell down the stairs catching yourself on one knee and both palms. Something cracked in your left wrist. When you managed to retain your feet he was standing above you on the patio burning gold-limned in the light from inside through the windows. He looked sainted with some holy vengeance but his eyes were so distant you could tell he was drunk. 

You remembered suddenly with a shocking clarity snorting too much Parke-Davis cocaine to sleep and you and he laid awake in the bed just kissing and kissing for hours like you would crawl inside one another. A focusless and improbable tandem and mutual devouring. You fell asleep in each other’s arms under the moth-eaten wool blanket on the bare mattress and then you never spoke of it again. 

“How fucking dare you,” he said very softly. “How bloody — fucking dare you.” 

“What have I — ”

He was down the steps in two strides and his hand struck for your throat so you swung a kind of desperate random punch (he was better in a fight and you knew this) and caught him in the meat of the shoulder. He lunged at you and you feinted but lost your balance on the rain-slick flagstones and went down hard in the grass on your hurt wrist. He kicked you once in the belly without much conviction and then he crouched, knees cracking, and grabbed you by the collar of your shirt. 

“Fucking say what you want to me for once,” you told him. It didn’t hurt to speak yet but there was a strange tightness. And you could feel the vial of laudanum in your coat pocket was broken. 

His lips and eyes moved with a wild drunk animation but he didn’t say anything so you spat in his face. Mostly blood. 

“I could fucking kill you,” he said. 

“Haven’t you already?” 

He let go your collar and the grass caught you. And he stepped away like you were catching. 

“Bloody hell. You can’t stand to not be looked at can you. You want — it gets you off to bloody ruin everything.” 

You lay back in the wet grass and cradled your wounded wrist against your chest. You could taste your nose bleeding against the back of your throat and your skinned palms left bloody prints on your shirt but you would not feel much of the pain at all until very much later when it would all come at once back upon you with knives. You had nothing left to say to him except something you were sure he already understood, because you had said it by now a hundred thousand times: _When you cut me as you always do you yourself do bleed. By which I mean you are the same as me…_

He went back inside up the patio steps, and you propped yourself with effort up on your elbows hearing the soft harmonics of the broken glass in your coat pocket. It had a hungry smell that bled out through the fabric like something alive but rotting. Eventually you sat up. Inside you were certain they were all watching because you could feel the caress of the eyes tender and jealous and distant. 

The cigarette you had been lighting when he’d first shoved you had snapped in the middle like a broken limb in a comic illustration and the end of it hung on by a strip of paper. Still you lit it and watched into the forest. When you looked at it in the sickly moonlight you saw already your wrist had begun to swell. 

\--

**XIII.**

The fight at the Ter Berge landowner’s salon was a mild scandal around Bruges but did not do much to dampen neither his nor your work nor your reputations. In those days it seemed scandals made careers more than broke them or at least this was true for men. You and the girl with the eye tattoos wandered the city in the night and the very early morning looking in the windows of galleries and salons where his work was shown. Khnopff told you over coffee one morning that some of your artist’s paintings had been purchased by tastemakers and gallerists and curators in Paris and in London and Amsterdam and Copenhagen who had also purchased works by Khnopff himself, and by Delville and Hodler and Redon and Rops; curators who spoke floridly of the Belgian tradition of idealism, aestheticism, romanticism, symbolism, whatever they were calling it in whichever company. 

Indeed in the windows in the galleries you could see the little red tag beside select among his works that you knew meant _sold_. And you remembered when he had sold his first painting and depending on how high you were the divine substance of the memory was either like watching a vaguely nostalgia-inducing but otherwise rather boring film or it was like ripping your own guts out of your mouth hand over hand. 

When she could tell how upset you were the girl embraced you and rocked you a little in the street and you wondered if she had such nightmares she smoked opium to diffuse or forget. You had talked to her about a lot of things, you thought you remembered; perhaps you had even told her about Cambridge. She had not told you very much about herself except that she was from a mountain town on the French border called Valenciennes and that her tattoos had been done in Paris where she had gone with intent to be a ballet dancer when she was fourteen. With a surprising grace belying the quantity of drugs she consumed she showed you some of the movements and you were laughing and she had you try some. 

“Put your feet — bend your knees. Now lift — ” 

You kicked out wildly to keep from falling on your ass and she dissolved into laughter. The novelist was watching from the threshold. 

It was a kind of mindfuck gamut you were running between feeling like the most loved and beautiful and genius person in the world and like a kind of broken tool whose imperfections had been masterfully exploited. Sometimes you sat on the edge of the canal and reasoned the success of your work hinged on your shatteredness and on what inorganic and manifestly impermanent glue you had used to repair the shatteredness. 

\--

Your work was published in numerous periodicals though rarely in the language in which it had been written. The girl with the eye tattoos translated select among your works into French and through your connections in Les XX these translations were published in the journals and reviews associated with the most renowned _salons littéraires._ You were invited there to read several times but you declined, or you accepted and then forgot about it or couldn’t afford the train ticket. A chapbook of your work was published in January 1890 and well reviewed across the continent and in England and even in America, where it was introduced to the right circles by friends of the novelist. Seeing it in a bookshop in Newcastle spurred your mother to write to you for the first time since your emigration but as you had stopped paying rent on the basement room and the landlord had subsequently burned most of your things left there in order to rent it out to an aspiring illustrator from Vienna you never saw the letter. Your sister left Bruges for a job in Ghent which you didn’t know about until a mutual friend asked after her and told you about it. 

Sometimes you saw your artist or the dream shape of him on the street in the snow or behind the pale handprinted glass working late of an evening in the studio on the canal but more often still you saw his work and more often still than that you saw his hangers-on who caught eye of you and whispered and looked away. 

\--

You were upstairs at Archibald’s for once drinking absinthe with the girl and the novelist and the rest of your ghoulish accompaniment and outside the night sky was thick and bright with a rich blizzard; you thought perhaps it was February or March, and earlier that day on the chaise in the novelist’s library whilst the girl tried infernally to play an out-of-tune viola and the tide was going out on you horrifically like golden thread desperately unspooling you had finished a poem. 

Perhaps at midnight you went to the bar for another bottle of wine to find he was there accompanied by three girls and a foppish gentleman. All five were in paroxysms of drunken laughter at something no doubt idiotic but he sobered quickly when he saw you and the rest of them set to whispering. 

You hadn’t spoken since the fight. Four or five months. And your wrist still hurt sometimes when it was wet. His face twisted in a kind of picturesque guilt. You turned to go even without the wine bottle but he grasped your shoulder. 

“Come outside and talk with me.” 

“It’s snowing.” 

The foppish gentleman handed you his coat which was a fine near-white wool dyed with colorful stripes. There were tiny bells sewn into the collar that made the gentlest sound when jostled. 

You put it on and you followed him out through the red curtain they’d hung to keep in the warmth of the fireplace and out through the frigid vestibule into the snow. The wind had quieted some through the day and a dense silence seemed to reign now. It was dark on the street and the snow soft and heavy as feathers and so quiet your ears were ringing and the candlelight and firelight flickered from the windows of the houses like cryptic signals to lost and wandering souls. 

“I had to tell you,” he said. He was trying his best not to appear quite as drunk as you could tell he was. “I’ve been trying. I sent a letter to the room — ”

“I don’t live there anymore.” 

“Oh.” 

He looked all over you with a piteous longing. How thin you knew you were inside the big wool coat. 

“I’m sorry,” he said; he took your wrist. His hands were cold. He looked this and that way down the street and you looked at the snow gathering on your scuffed black shoes. The way he shifted his weight against the cornices of snow and ice like so much white cocaine dust. “I’m so sorry.” 

“What are you sorry for.” 

“For that night. I bloody — I lost it, I was drunk. I’m sorry.” 

Don’t lie to me, you almost said. What do you fucking want from me? 

“I’m — I miss you — ”

You laughed one punched-out wounded sort of laugh that shook a little in the snow and silence. 

“I mean it. I bloody mean it.” He took a breath. “I’m sorry about all of it.” 

“All of it.” 

“Yes,” he said, “all of it.” 

He couldn’t name all of it if you asked him, said the vengeful thing in the back of your mind. 

“I just had to tell you,” he went on. “When you — God. I’ve forgiven you.” 

“Have you really.” 

“Yes. It took me forever to understand. But now — ” 

Impossibly there was a little redness and moisture in the corner of his eye but perhaps it was just the cold. 

“I have forgiven you,” he said, “I’ve read everything — it’s broken my heart, everything you’ve published. But I mean that kindly. That’s what you meant it to do isn’t it? That’s how I understood.” 

And he looked at you with such conviction. But it would never go back to how it had been after so long squandered. 

“I’m so sorry — so very sorry. Is what I’m trying to say.” 

Whatever sacred fluttering ember remained of your heart was screaming at you to forgive him. Just to have him close to you again however he would allow and to feel his heartbeat again in the darkness in his wrist and throat and chest like a model of strength and of certainty. Let him in, it was telling you, let him in again because I cannot take much longer. But instead you took the big wool coat off and pressed it into his hands. 

“What — ”

“Tell your friend I said thank you for it.” 

“You’ll freeze.” 

“No, I won’t.” 

He said your name the most desperately he had ever said it in your memory outside of sex. “Come back inside.” 

“I’m only going down the block.” 

There was another place around the corner, a grocery where sometimes in the back they had pipes and opium from China; it was more expensive and you didn’t know the proprietors so you hardly went but you were loathe to go inside again with him and face the rest of them — not now. 

“Where — ”

“Never you mind where.” 

He had relinquished his claim on you like you were some small nation, you reminded yourself. He had no rights any longer to know your comings or goings. Still turning your back on him felt like everything inside you bound up in rough rope and pulled tighter and tighter with each and every step. 

He called your name again after you and the snow swallowed it. When you turned the corner you realized your face felt hot because you were crying. 

\--

**XIV.**

You woke in darkness which slowly developed in the daylight coming under the door. The ceilings were high and it smelled of fruit and produce so you reasoned it was the back room of the grocery. All around you were sleeping and comatose forms and the ponderous dreaming breath of one of them constituted the strange warmth you could feel at your shoulder. Your wrist hurt. And at first you could not remember in the slightest how you had gotten there. In fact you couldn’t remember at all until you managed to go out into the grocery braving the brilliant and refracting light off the snow in the square through the ashy front windows, buy an apple from the salesgirl who woefully undercharged you because of her own opium wooziness, and remember you had no coat. You were too high still to really care or to wonder with much consequence where it was because you had your notebook and wallet with you and knew now you needed little else to survive. But you remembered how it had come to be that you were without it. And his hand at your wrist and the hollowness of his apology. And worst of all the degree to which you had longed for it anyway. 

You went out into the square into the biting frigid wind and the vivid light diffuse out of the moon-pale sky. Hardly anyone had come out to shovel and the snow was halfway to your knee and heavy and there were footprints in it abstract and gestural like braille markings in some unfamiliar language. It was brutally cold and the silent stillness haunted-feeling but you walked hugging yourself down to the canal thinking you would go to whichever of the cafes was open or possibly to the novelist’s; though it was unlikely he or the girl with the eye tattoos had made it back to those smoky rooms the night previous the butler would be in and he knew you by sight. 

Instead you found yourself thinking as the tide went out about him and what he had said. And as the tide went out you remembered more and more of it in glaring color reproduction with photographic accuracy. 

How dare he try to guilt you into forgiveness, you thought. Your teeth chattered. And he said he had forgiven you but for what? Perhaps he had forgiven you for daring to be heartbroken. He had forgiven you for loving him in the first place — for throwing yourself into it as into the canal, as into infinity. He had forgiven you for seeking infinity at whatever perceived cost as though that were not the entire point of being a bloody artist. He had forgiven you for not wanting the exact same things he wanted and swallowing them up heedlessly along with all the gleeful voyeurism he took to be admiration. And he had forgiven you for neither wanting nor needing anybody else. For your contentment to bind your soul only to one other in this world he had forgiven you. He had spent so long pitying you for it all perhaps it was only appropriate. 

A stiff biting fever-chill swept up through your whole body like a desert wind. The breeze had started coming again low out of the sky and sweeping in the alleys and around the corners with a low and mournful cry. You ducked into a closed shop’s vestibule and checked your wallet to see if you could afford a coffee somewhere (anywhere) but you had nothing. Perhaps last night in the grocery you had been pickpocketed. It was one more indignity to add to the growing list of them. 

You were not far from his studio on Dijver and at first you thought you would just go to get warm. After all it was certain he was not there. Likely he was in some girl’s syphilitic featherbed languishing in fucked-out inevitability with one of his hash cigarettes and a pouch of cocaine. Drawing her in his little book as he had once drawn you under similar circumstances half-conscious and drugged-feeling and laughing as though it were a sickness, sharing his cigarette, watching out the high ashy window of the basement room at the blown snowdrift gathering, and the golden-hour sun when it dared peek out from behind the fog and the seam of the church spire, at the fire in the grate, at his lips, his breath, and your mind was generating endless and miraculous words… 

Then you thought certainly he would have money there. At least he would have a little change. And if he didn’t have any money he would have work you could take perhaps to sell. Or maybe in fact what you needed was to burn it — 

You forced that thought to the back of your mind. When you reached the studio you tried to pick the lock open with your penknife, fumbling in the cold; when it wouldn’t go you shoved against the heavy whitewashed wooden door with your hip and shoulder until it opened and you fell through it. 

Closed it behind you and climbed the stairs. It smelled like paints and turpentine and it was warm with an old fire and the memory — the nostalgia — was like a physical blow to the back of the head. You could taste it like blood in your mouth. Climbing the stairs at the old place nervous and shying behind your sister and the shadow and the broken glass — sitting there all day and all night with him in silence at his feet like a dog while he painted and he didn’t notice when you left and came back in a half hour with bread and wine and cheese and made him eat because otherwise he would have forgotten. 

Handsome halcyon days when he needed you. Or pretended he did convincingly. 

The upstairs door to the studio was unlocked and there was nobody else working in the great cavernous room. Evidently there hadn’t been all the day before because the embers in the grate were cold and a bit of snow had piled up on one of the sills where someone had left a window just open. He still painted in the same corner; you could tell his station by the state of his paints and brushes in a messy ashy jumble, shelves stacked with canvases and notebooks, pallets scattered and paint and ink dripped in abstract pointillist collage upon the floor… 

The cold wracked another chill up through you, wringing, like dirty water from a dishcloth. You went over to look as though you had been asked to identify a corpse. And on his easel still in-progress (canvas vacant in some places but for a smudgy charcoal guide) he had painted you in the dark in the grass at the Ter Berge landowner’s tormented by a looming shadow figure in a heavy black coat. He had given the moonlight the interrogative and impersonal cast of a gaslamp in a morgue and beside the canvas on a torn corner of paper he had written in his abominable handwriting some potential titles. When you picked it up the shaking of your hand was in it like a last leaf. 

_The Fight  
_ _The Sorrow  
_ _Peter with Sorrow  
_ _Memory Tormenting Me  
_ _The Memory that Torments Me_

You put the paper back down again carefully where you had lifted it and looked back at the canvas again. When you saw he had not yet entirely finished your face you covered your mouth tightly with your hand. As though you were truly in danger of confessing anything untoward to anybody besides yourself. 

You took one of his notebooks down from the shelf behind you and opened it and saw yourself in it. They were dated in the corners from the last month. He drew you here and there again and again in bleeding charcoal that had smudged the pages thunderstorm grey. On one page he had shakily copied down a few lines from one of your most resolutely damning poems: 

_If you ever look for me you will find first threescore and ten who are not me  
_ _but who wear my face and do my bidding […]  
_ _What have I ever asked of you but conflagration, consummation:  
_ _Burn this body when you’re done with it._

Accompanying the text were druggily monstrous sketches of creatures distorted just beyond their humanity holding before whatever grotesque visages masks of your face in uncanny facsimile. And yet it took you a few moments to realize which of them was really you — in a corner in one of your oversize suits you had the same pallid falseness upon your face but it was no mask. You found you could not look at it for very long because the eyes seemed to follow you. 

_Nightmare,_ he had written atop another page. He had copied one of his old sketches from the day he had thought you were dying but you had passed whatever threshold this time and your eyes and mouth were open and slack. The light in your face he usually drew out even just with ink or charcoal was extinguished and around you were an array of tortured figures mourning and you held in skeletal hands folded across your chest a vibrant bouquet of poppies hued in ink dark and vivid red as blood… 

In another you were walking on the street in the snow accompanied by a pair of skeletons. In another he had done a sort of portrait bust at first you did not recognize to be yourself because it was so angelic; your eyes were closed, your hands were folded, your mouth was just apart as though you had been speaking, and your shirt was rumpled and a little undone, and around your head was a sort of corona of the same brilliant red flowers. 

You closed the notebook and put it down beside you and wept. Gasping sinking horrible weeping twisting up through you into the emptiness… That of course he did still after everything and as such the fault of it was on you because you had not believed. And every terrible thing you had done to yourself and to him because you had not believed… 

Sitting there in the silence you let it wring you out until it had started to get dark in the window and the cold became intolerable. There was nothing left inside to cry except the longing for the drug and the nausea stirring vaguely at the pit of your stomach either some manifestation of it or of something more metaphysical entirely. You picked up one of his stubs of charcoal and the slip of paper with the list of titles and crookedly, shakily in your numb hands, you circled _the Sorrow_. Then you got up, stumbling, dizzy, nearly puked on the floor, took a ragged blanket that had been draped over another artist’s canvases, and went back out into the vicious cold treading a familiar path through the snowdrifts toward Archibald’s. 

It was rather a shame you knew nothing to do anymore to soothe the fever or staunch the wound. Once writing had done it but now writing just seemed to claw it open like you were seeking maggots in it. 

The girl with the eye tattoos wasn’t there but the novelist was and when he saw your piteous state (shaking, damp and numb, eyes red, strung out) he paid your way at the door. “Where did you go last night?” he asked. He guided you to one of the pipes in the back corner and you let yourself be guided. What you longed for (what you had always longed for, you figured) was just to drown it — to surrender. So horribly and demonically simple to forfeit your own consciousness and so much easier than reckoning with its bullshit whims and its false certainties and its black dog named guilt following behind you on the endless windy moor… 

“Down to the grocery,” you said. “Somebody picked my pocket.” 

“We took your coat back to my rooms. I saw you go outside with — ” 

So much as the thought of him thrilled and terrified you. It felt like something stepping on your chest. “I can’t — I can’t. Let’s not.” 

The novelist passed you the mouthpiece of the pipe and you took a hit and tried to pass it back. But he said, “Have another.” 

“I — ” 

“Let it just — melt away.” 

People had been known to die this way, you remembered. His _Nightmare_ from the sketchbook… but you couldn’t be bothered. It shifted through you in waves exiling first the cold and then the hunger and then the guilt and then the sorrow and then anything else at all. 

\--

**XV.**

After not so very long it crept back up on you in slow silent steps like love did, or like a cutthroat. It was rolling you around between its hands like a ball of clay. For the first time you found the no-place where it put you was grievously haunted by monsters and apparitions that always seemed to be just behind you breathing on the nape of your neck. And so out of the nothingness came a sort of rabid screaming fear which swallowed you up into itself and rocked. Eventually you realized you were lying on the floor in the dark room alone as ever you had made yourself but you couldn’t move. It had all the stuff of itself wrapped around your limbs and shoved down your throat and struck still through your eyes heavy and grasping as sand and you wondered if you truly couldn’t breathe or see or if time was just moving so achingly slowly you had forgotten to need to. 

From somewhere a commotion of light and words sharp as shards of glass. The sound and the brightness shook you apart for a second and then you turned away from it into the womb of the darkness. 

“ — the fuck out of my fucking way,” he said, “I should kill you.” 

Christ Jesus no, you were thinking. Every goddamn fucking time. What’s the fucking point of it if — 

You felt him beside you hovering like a supplicant and then his hands were on your face pulling your hair away from your eyes and mouth and he was saying all this desperate nonsense. _Oh love, where’d you go love, where are you?_ It ripped up like a knife from the navel bursting the ribs and the throat like spun sugar and you made a sound against the floor like a scream or a sob or no sound at all but a kind of desperate scraping against the chalk inside you. 

“Mr — if you would only — ”

“What the fuck is wrong with him.” 

His hand was against your heartbeat in your chest solid and grounding and you dared to clutch desperately his wrist and it felt real. 

“He’s had too much is all. He’ll be alright.” 

“He’ll be — ” He made a sound like disgust or something and you curled up around it like a blow. You thought perhaps you would be sick. And the whispers you could hear around felt like a sustained siren screaming and the light (he had a lantern with him or a candlestick or something) burnt your skin. A cleansing sort of pain where it touched you like a wound cauterized with hot metal. And all the sound and voices like some scouring eternity of wind that sloughed the loose wreckage from you and carried it away. 

What you were always forgetting to remember was that it had always been like this at least once every time. That he found you when you thought you were dying and though he had left you before and would leave you again it seemed only when you told him to leave he stayed with you to spite you. “Damn you,” he said, “you shit, you fucking — ” His hand was in a fist in the fabric of your shirt and he was trying very hard to pretend he wasn’t crying but you could feel he was — like that rotting apple sort of feeling inside your own throat soft and mealy and choking. “God damn you,” he said. “Can you even hear me?” 

Yes, you tried; your voice made no sound. 

“What in hell were you thinking.” He sniffled or winced. He smelled like fear. “What in hell…” 

Gently in his other hand he cradled your skull against the floor. The ragged nail of his smallest finger pressed in the corner of your eye. 

[ _It isn’t so bad_ , he was saying, out of the cyclical referent of time, _it’s not so bad; you can get up, can’t you_? 

He had worked a punishment detail with the medic after being caught with contraband and had seen worse and you knew it. He had burned the amputated limbs of your platoonmates in a great stinking pit of bones. This he had told you in an ecstasy of poetics while you walked together over the great burnt vacancy behind the lines, where nothing was. The fog and smoke of war was thick as a ghost and tasted like ashes when breathed. 

It hurt worse than fucking death but there was no morphine left anymore and anyway if there had been he wouldn’t let you have any after last time. He had propped you up against the great carven wall of mud in the rain which rattled on your helmets. The heel of his hand pressed up against the wound and your blood was running down his wrist like veins made external. Above your heads the birdlike screaming of heavy artillery had become a sort of mindless static. 

_You can get up_ , he said again, _come on_. 

His voice thick as mud. The rainwater pooling at your feet was tinged reddish with your blood like a witch’s concoction — ] 

Your vision swam so when he helped you stand that you bent double and nearly puked. He had slung your arm around his shoulder but your knees didn’t work. Gravity seemed to weigh more heavily on you than anyone or anything else and it was pressing shoving down and splintering. 

“How,” you tried. At the foot of the stairs. His lips were pursed so tightly they were white. 

“I can’t fucking carry you,” he said tightly, “I can’t.” 

“I meant — how did you find — ” 

[ You were sitting in his bed smoking a cigarette and downstairs you could hear him shouting. Your mouth tasted like salt and in your head were nine thousand vengeful slamming doors and you itched. Desperately you itched. 

When he came back in he slammed the door. Nine thousand and one. It felt like a slap across the face. _That’s done then_ , he said. Dusting off his hands or something. His face was drawn and cold with lack of sleep and the whites of his eyes like blood in milk. 

_Right_. 

_You’re welcome_ , he said. In the space he left between you when he sat down was nothing more or less than eternity. He reached for his pack of cigarettes but you’d taken the last one. He would’ve given you shit about it in another life but instead he turned away and pressed the heel of his hand against the center of his forehead. 

_I’m sorry._

_Haven’t you got any?_

_They were downstairs._

_Bloody hell_. 

He was so overwhelmingly impassably beautiful and like this he looked like a figure from Attic tragedy rendered in the neoclassical style. All the harsh fluorescent light on him. After all you wouldn’t be here very long and soon it would all be over. But you itched… and you were thinking, if you don’t hold me back if you don’t fucking tie me up and keep me forever I’ll do it again and again and again and I don’t know if I even want to — 

But there was precedent. There is precedent — ] 

“I had a feeling,” he said. Like a bolt to the chest. You were almost shocked to remember there was still a now. “You know when you have a guilty dream and you wake up and you still feel guilty.” For a moment, overwhelmed, he pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he said, “Come on.” 

Dragged you up the stairs and through the silent bar. On the street the dawn was in a corner of the sky beyond the snowy eaves and the darkened windows a kind of painterly blushing of false color-blur against the rusty Continental fog. The cobblestones wet with snow and ice having melted in the night and in the cold silence a kind of music. It was so perfect as to be completely impossible. 

“Carl.” 

“Hmm.” 

“Is this — is it real?” 

He took a kind of steadying breath — his shoulders rose and fell. “Yes. Now is real. Bruges is real and we’re real. Real as anything.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Yes, yes I’m sure.” 

And what do you think will happen now? And what do you think has ever happened or will ever happen? 

[ — up at the creaking icebound ship toward the sharp blue sky there was no mind left only stillness and uselessly, pathetically, hopelessly, insanely, he was holding your frozen hands under his shirt to warm them — ] 

**Author's Note:**

> this story is named after the song by [leonard cohen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0nmHymgM7Y), in attempt at its level of drama.  
> all of the artists mentioned in this story really existed and so did the salon [les xx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_XX). [fernand khnopff](https://www.wikiart.org/en/fernand-khnopff) and [james ensor](https://www.wikiart.org/en/james-ensor) are my two favorite artists from this period hence why they're mentioned so much in this story.  
> most of carl's paintings are based on [jean delville](http://visualmelt.com/Jean-Delville), [fernand hodler](http://www.artistsandart.org/2010/05/ferdinand-hodler-1853-1918-swiss-art.html), and/or [aubrey beardsley's](https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/aubrey-beardsley-illustrations-for-salome-by-oscar-wilde) illustrations for oscar wilde's "salome."  
> much of my research for this is out of one of the few books i've saved from my undergrad career, [symbolist art in context](http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520255821), which i highly recommend if this historical moment intrigues you  
> thank you so much to [montparnasse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse) for helping me make this (as everything) happen.   
> more reference points [here on tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/tagged/you-want-it-darker)


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